European Educational Research Journal 

About: European Educational Research Journal is an academic journal published by RU Publications. The journal publishes majorly in the area(s): Higher education & Educational research. It has an ISSN identifier of 1474-9041. Over the lifetime, 980 publications have been published receiving 19761 citations. The journal is also known as: EERJ.

Neo-liberalism and marketisation : the implications for higher education

Abstract: This article is based on a keynote paper presented to the European Conference on Educational Research (ECER), University College Dublin, 5-9 September 2005. The massification of education in European countries over the last 100 years has produced cultures and societies that have benefited greatly from state investment in education. To maintain this level of social and economic development that derives from high quality education requires continual state investment. With the rise of the New Right, neo-liberal agenda, there is an attempt to offload the cost of education, and indeed other public services such as housing, transport, care services etc., on to the individual. There is an increasing attempt to privatise public services, including education, so that citizens will have to buy them at market value rather than have them provided by the state. Europe is no exception to this trend of neo-liberalisation. Recent Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) reports, including one on higher education in Ireland, (2004), concentrate strongly on the role of education in servicing the economy to the neglect of its social and developmental responsibilities. The view that education is simply another market commodity has become normalised in policy and public discourses. Schools run purely as businesses are a growing phenomenon within and without Europe, and there is an increasing expectation in several countries that schools will supplement their income from private sources, even though they are within the state sector. In this article, the writer presents both a critique of the neo-liberal model of marketised education and a challenge to academics to work as public intellectuals both individually and with civil society organisations to develop a counter- hegemonic discourse to neo-liberalism for higher education.

Restrained Teaching: The Common Core of Didaktik:

Abstract: Didaktik is at the centre of most school teaching and teacher education in Continental Europe, but at the same time almost unknown in the English speaking world. The article gives a brief outline of the history and the common core of Didaktik, of its current situation, and of the basic differences compared to the Anglo-American concept of 'curriculum and instruction' and the French 'transposition didactique'. The common core of Didaktik is characterised as 'restrained teaching', based on (a) a commitment to Bildung, (b) the educative difference of matter and meaning, and (c) the autonomy of teaching and learning. Ask any teacher of the elementary or secondary schools in Germany the reason for any particular method or practice, and you will find him ready with an answer. (John Tilden Prince, 1892, p. 232) When the American educator John Tilden Prince travelled German schools in the late nineteenth century in a mission on behalf of the Massachusetts Board of Education, he was most impressed by the level of teacher knowledge and education: Less difference in the quality of teaching and greater uniformity in the results, than with us are observable. Few teachers will be found who have not a definite object in all their work, and who do not strive to reach that object in a systematic and methodical way. ... they have well studied opinions, both in regard to the object to be reached and the means to be taken to reach it. (1892, p. 75) Prince moves on to describe exemplary lessons, typical teaching materials and examples of classroom practice, all of them seemingly grounded in a joint base of a highly developed 'pedagogical content knowledge', as Lee Shulman (1987) would put it nowadays. Basically, Prince's book was a thorough description of the state, content and function of general and subject matter Didaktik as it was perceived in most of Continental and Northern Europe at the end of the nineteenth century. Some of his contemporaries (like Dewey) were well aware of and much inspired by this continental tradition. However, it never made its way into the mainstream of American teacher education. There, it was replaced in the early twentieth century by concepts like Dewey's own 'curriculum' and Thorndike's 'educational psychology'. To understand Prince' fascination with the subject, and to understand how Didaktik differed from 'curriculum' then and now, one has to understand the common roots of Didaktik in history and presence, and the shared fundamentals of Didaktik theories across different schools of thought. Nowadays, this common core of Didaktik is challenged by changing conditions of schooling, which leads to the question, whether it should be replaced by other approaches. By dealing with these points, I will try to answer the question put forward by the organiser of the 2007 European Conference for Educational Research at the University of Geneva, Bernard Schneuwly: how one could characterise the common core of Didaktik and how knowledge transformation is different within a Didaktik approach compared to both the Anglo-Saxon tradition of speaking about 'curriculum and instruction' and the French 'transposition didactique'. As this is meant as an

The Global Politics of Educational Borrowing and Lending

Abstract: In the summer of 1943 Americans were marching victoriously through Sicily and making their way up the Italian peninsula to fight Fascist and Nazi troops, and eventually defeat them. They had planned to complement the military action with action in the field of education and to that purpose educator Carleton Washburne – at the time an officer and soon in charge of such task – gathered as much information as possible about the Fascist school system, on the one hand, and endeavoured to change it by infusing it with democratic values supported by a progressive education perspective, and by revising school textbooks and contents, on the other (Washburne, 1970; Fornaca, 1982). The overall aim was not to overturn the school system that they had found, but – as a report issued by the Allies stated – to change it step by step since both the system and ‘the human material ... cannot be transported suddenly and without shocks into the new one by way of a magic wand’ (Fornaca, 1982, p. 40). Italians who were fighting in the Resistance against Nazis and Fascists had also engaged in reforming the Fascist educational ideology and structure as soon as they liberated a town or a valley, but for various reasons they could maintain control over their military and civil successes in a limited way (Fornaca, 1982, p. 40). With regard to the educational changes under way and promoted by the Allied troops, it was the Catholic Church that proved to be the interlocutor whose disagreement over choice of educational advisors or decisions about religious instruction had to be reckoned with and appeased (Washburne, 1970; Fornaca, 1982). In the end, with Washburne’s supervision, a group of Italian educators prepared the 1945-46 primary school curricula. Much of the new educational model was rooted in the American and British traditions that many Italian educators judged more amenable than others to life in republican Italy, though Dewey and his educational thought and pedagogy never gained unquestioned consensus and popularity in post-war Italy. The lessons Washburne brought from elsewhere to be disseminated into a new sociocultural and political territory were filtered through the sieve of different, and competing, local educational traditions and eventually re-elaborated into a culturespecific perspective on schooling and education that owed much to the newly established Italian political balance.

What's the Point of Lifelong Learning if Lifelong Learning Has No Point? On the Democratic Deficit of Policies for Lifelong Learning

Abstract: What’s the point of lifelong learning if lifelong learning has no point? On the democratic deficit of policies for lifelong learning

Constructing a European Policy Space in Educational Governance: The Role of Transnational Policy Actors:

Abstract: Educational policy is no longer, if it ever was, the product of the nation state alone. In Europe, significant policy actors in education are working today face to face and virtually in joint gover...