Alison Buckler – ��Ĵ�ý

Re-imagining and re-bordering conference spaces and edges: anticipatory reflections from the coordinators of ��Ĵ�ý 2024’s Borderless sub-theme

Alison Buckler — Fri, 08 Mar 2024 09:50:43 +0000

Image Source: Alison Buckler

“Educational practice, whether it be authoritarian or democratic, is always directive.”

(Paulo Freire, Pedagogy of Hope, 1992, p.82)

The theme for ��Ĵ�ý 2024 calls for a ‘radical re-imagining’ and ‘re-bordering’ of the work of education that goes beyond the rhetoric. Our starting point for the borderless sub-theme was a desire to reimagine (some of) the borders within the parallel-session convention of academic conferences. In our call for abstracts we suggested that conferences themselves can represent, reproduce and reify borders of practical and intellectual inclusion: who can attend, who feels welcome and whose knowledge is incorporated, endorsed and validated (see related article links below this post). In this blog we share an expanded explanation of our justification for, and hopes for, this sub-theme. How might these borders be disrupted? How might spaces and edges in parallel sessions be shifted, blurred, merged and transposed in ways that feel enriching, inclusive and generative?

Our re-imagining focuses on three things that we think have potential for re-bordering: themes, projects, and the boundaries of space and time in presentation rooms.

First, we suggest that conference sub-themes and parallel sessions can create silos around bodies of work. This implies a particular way of organising knowledge and framing ideas in relation to the overarching theme and can limit opportunities for transgressing boundaries and seeing connections. The terminology doesn’t help: parallel lines never meet! In our borderless sub-theme, we invite abstracts with a broad perspective that complements (but may also challenge) the parallel sub-themes. We welcome contributions that centre a concept of (re)bordering education but sit outside or across the other sub-themes.

Second, most conference presentations focus on a project. Often this project is already complete – the data has been generated, analysed, prepared and polished for an audience. Even if a project is ongoing, it is usually a fixed entity: the literature has been reviewed, and the team, budget, locations, stakeholders, research questions and research design are in place. When we present projects we draw and assert boundaries around them, as well as our place within them. In our borderless sub-theme, we invite abstracts that centre an idea. What drives your work under the overarching theme of crises and borders in education? What frustrates it? What theories or approaches are at its heart? Do normative definitions or framings enrich or limit possibilities in this area of work?

We anticipate that ideas will likely draw on projects as inspiration, but we strongly discourage presentations that summarise project process (e.g., a chronological walk through research questions, approach, analysis, findings, discussion). Instead, we encourage presentations that showcase a particular aspect of a project with the intention of starting conversations and creating connections: if someone wants to find out more about the finer details of your project, you can tell them about it over lunch!

The third set of borders we have been thinking about are in relation to the (traditional) classroom set up of presentation rooms. There is a clear boundary between the presenter and the audience, and rigid timings dictating how long we get to spend on each side of the border: conventional patterns of hierarchical interaction that can . What if we didn’t sit in rows facing the front? What if we sat in a circle, facing each other? What if we didn’t have three people talking for fifteen minutes followed by a chaired Q&A? What if there were no power-points, but pictures, poems or objects to represent ideas? What if each presenter introduced their idea and then engaged in a supported dialogue around connections between them?

In the borderless sub-theme, we are hoping to explore these possibilities and welcome suggestions for others. We invite abstracts with ideas unfettered by normative conceptual presentational borders, from colleagues enthusiastic about engaging practically with new spaces and edges in a presentation room.

These ideas are complementary to the work of the ��Ĵ�ý 2024 conference committee, which is working hard to identify, question and re-shape normative conference borders in a wider sense. We will be working closely with them to see what might be feasible in our strand. We will also work closely with the inclusion sub-committee; we are conscious that conventional conference formats have in-built features and processes to support inclusion, and that well-meaning and enthusiastic ideas for change can be unintentionally exclusionary. However, returning to Freire whose pedagogy is a key inspiration in our initiative, we hope colleagues in the ��Ĵ�ý community will consider submitting an abstract to the borderless sub-theme, and join our attempt to become ‘ever more curious’ in terms of noticing the ‘directive’ nature of conference borders, and re-imagining alternatives.

A further note from the coordinators:

Coordinating this sub-theme has been an opportunity to critically reflect on the idea of borders within the parallel session convention. We plan to write an extended and more academic piece, but we wanted to share our thinking at this point when we know colleagues are preparing their abstracts. If you submit an abstract to this sub-theme, please share your idea, how it originated, the research it draws from (if appropriate), how it relates to the conference theme and sub-theme, and suggestions for how you might introduce it in a borderless session (for coherence and transparency the panel will be guided by the main ��Ĵ�ý 2024 abstract review criteria of relevance, originality, clarity and significance). To help us develop the grounded groupings of ideas, please include 2-3 keywords.

We recognise that some people may have already submitted their abstract (and others may not read this blog post prior to submission). We will review these abstracts with enthusiasm and no one will be disadvantaged if their abstract does not align with the submission suggestions above: we set out in our initial call that this sub-theme was an opportunity to collectively connect ideas into a grounded and purposeful agenda. We will invite the authors of all successful submissions to be a part of this process and anticipate that all abstracts may develop accordingly.

If you have any questions, please get in touch with Alison Buckler, Camilla Hadi Chaudhary or Hiba Salem.

Related Articles

‘Out-of-school girls’: do we need to re-think the terminology?

Alison Buckler — Wed, 22 Mar 2023 13:17:33 +0000

Photo Source: Alison Buckler

Dr Alison Buckler (The Open University, UK) and Dr Faith Mkwananzi (University of the Free State, South Africa)

Rea is a security guard during the week, and a fruit-seller in her spare time. She earns enough money to run a household and put her son and two siblings through school.

Lebo does manual labour six days a week, despite having a limb disorder and a visual impairment. Her work supports her husband and young children, who also have disabilities.

Winnie lives with her husband and son. She runs a thriving business selling sweets and potato chips at the nearby school.

For the past decade we have been working on a range of research and practitioner initiatives with adolescent and young women in southern Africa. Their lives have been distinct and diverse, with periods of financial comfort and stability as well as poverty and uncertainty. What unites their experiences – across countries and contexts – is that they have been through intermittent periods of formal schooling and were, when we first met them, an age at which they could be enrolled in secondary school. The short-hand in the policy, practitioner, and academic literature to describe them (and we have used this ourselves) is ‘out-of-school girls’ or ‘girls who are out-of-school’. Recently we have been reflecting on whether this is appropriate.

What’s wrong with ‘out-of-school’?

The term ‘out-of-school’ to describe those not engaged with formal education is one-dimensional. It pitches (non-)enrollment status as the defining issue in someone’s life, when we know that when young people are unable to remain in school, it is most often a response to complex challenges rather than the main challenge itself. Rea left school because while she was there, she was unable to protect her siblings from abuse at home. Lebo’s parents sent her siblings to school instead of her because they didn’t see the benefit for a teenager with disabilities. Winnie left school because she and her brother were thrown out of the family home, and she had to care for him full-time.

When the defining label for a person is ‘out-of-school’, it implicitly suggests that enrollment in a formal school is the solution to a complex life. This can lead to narrowly focused policies and campaigns that might not be in the best interests of young women and their families.

While the for girls being in school is persuasive, there is also a growing body of literature that highlights the limited impact formal schooling can have on job opportunities and earning potential, especially for female students. Studies also show that schools can create or exacerbate challenges in the lives of girls and young women: gendered discrimination, abuse and the belittling of intellectual abilities can be amplified.

Relatedly, a problem with the pro-school argument is that nearly all data on the benefits of girls’ education comes from girls’ schooling (i.e. school-based learning and outcomes data). There is no comparative body of data for alternative education pathways, which creates a false binary between girls in school and girls not in school. This can lead policy makers to propose formal school as the only ‘visible’ policy solution to being ‘out-of-school’, whether this is what an individual wants or needs.

A recent Girls’ Education Challenge (GEC) confirms that alternative, flexible education pathways are more appealing for many young women and their families especially those of post-primary age. Our own research also shows that full-time attendance at school is often incompatible with family and work commitments.

We asked Rea, Lebo, Winnie and their peers about the label ‘out-of-school’. They felt it implied a desire to return to school, which most didn’t relate to as it had not been a particularly happy or supportive experience. As one said: “often, there is no coaching or mentoring, and the teacher continued to teach despite the fact that I did not understand; they follow those who are more intelligent, and those who do not have intelligence fall further and further behind”.

However, they did recognise the instrumental benefits of the ‘out-of-school’ label: for them it had been a passport to access a skills-training programme. They were of the view that they are better off with entrepreneurial skills such as soap making, candle making, and hairdressing acquired through informal learning, which they saw as more likely to lead to financial independence, than a school certificate. They contrasted this with people they knew with a school certificate, but no job.

Ultimately, while they understood the label ‘out-of-school’ could have a currency, they felt it carried a stigma: the association with not having completed school made them feel ‘�ܲԾ��Գٱ��Գ�’ and ‘��Գ��ǳ��ٱ�’, and therefore – once labelled – less likely to feel comfortable returning to formal school.

What’s wrong with ‘girl’?

Our second issue is the problematic and reductive use of the word ‘girl’, particularly in relation to the label ‘out-of-school’. It can compound the already over-simplified framing of the scale and complexity of challenges in education. Crucially, what is rarely acknowledged is that who are likely to have very different needs to primary age children.

Consider Lebo, Rea and Winnie, for example. They are described as ‘girls’ but are also responsible for their own primary age children. Using the same word to define individuals in such distinct life-stages (that of a mother and her child – a generation apart) masks the nuance of educational needs.

The word ‘girl’ is, by definition, infantilising. highlights how dominant development discourse on ‘child-marriage’ considers those under 18 to have no decision-making capacity. The word, ‘girl’ can depict an individual with little authority or agency: a child who has limited ability to take independent, rationally informed action that can bring about changes they desire in their own lives, let alone the lives of others.

Taking up work to care for family, and juggling their education alongside this work, places Rea, Lebo and Winnie in positions of responsibility, making them accountable to those who depend on them. Such a responsibility requires skills, agency and independence beyond the capacity of a child. But calling them ‘girls’ can make these qualities invisible, reduce their relevance in development agendas and validate normative development power dynamics.

We asked Winnie, Rea, Lebo and their peers about the word ‘girl’ too. Their responses were complex and context-specific. To be called a ‘girl’ by a community or family member, for example, would be an insult. They certainly didn’t see themselves as ‘girls’, but again they were strategic in how they managed their identity around this term and recognised the instrumental benefits of it when interacting with NGOs: as Lebo said “we are sometimes called children, and then we move with the children”. Another said “if an NGO says ‘stand up if you are a girl, you stand up”.

Underpinning the regular calls to listen to the voices of girls in development agendas is the implicit suggestion that this listening may be tokenistic because, after all, they are only children. If young women buy in to this narrative themselves, accepting the term for the benefits it can provide, downplaying their maturity to fit the label, how does this influence the platforms they are given to speak? How does it influence what they say on these platforms? How does it influence how their voices are ?

What are the alternatives?

We do not have a new all-purpose replacement for the term ‘out-of-school girl’. In our own work we are experimenting with being more descriptive and specific and using phrases like ‘adolescent and young women who are not currently in formal education’ – but we appreciate this can lead to clunky and over-wordy sentences.

We try to refer to Rea, Lebo, Winnie and their peers as young women or youth, because this is more respectful of their maturity and experience and how they told us they see themselves (although some disliked ‘youth’ for its association with political parties). We no longer refer to them as being ‘out-of-school’ because we know that they have many pressing priorities and ambitions, and (especially now they are older), returning to a formal secondary school setting is not one of them.

We recognise that at practitioner level, many programmes do consider the nuance of individuals’ ages and life stages. We also appreciate that simply changing terminology is not enough and can even lead to less respectful and less sensitive work in development hidden behind more progressive terminology. But use of the phrase ‘out-of-school girl’ to represent a group of people spanning generations is showing few signs of abating, and push-back against the term in mainstream global development narratives is minimal.

Rea, Lebo, Winnie and their peers were clear about the tensions between the label of ‘out-of-school girl’ given to them by NGOs and how they saw themselves. They linked this to fears they have about returning to formal school – a setting for children, where they would be treated as children – which was incompatible with their primary identities as parents, wives, business owners and heads of house-holds. They occasionally accepted the label, co-opting dominant narratives, but they did not identify with either element of it.

Therefore, with this blog we add the phrase ‘out-of-school girl’ to the growing list of questionable terminology in an ongoing call for development researchers and practitioners to be conscious of and reflective about the of words and phrases on development relationships, power, ambitions, actions and outcomes.

Alison Buckler

Alison Buckler is a Senior Research Fellow at The Open University where she is Co-Deputy Director of the Centre for the Study of Global Development. Her work focuses on using creative and narrative approaches to researching education, and she is the co-founder of the Ibali Network which supports people interested in using storytelling methodologies. She has been a member of the ��Ĵ�ý Executive Committee since 2015, serving as Secretary between 2018-2020, and Vice-Chair between 2020-2024.

Faith W Mkwananzi

Faith Mkwananzi is Researcher at the University of the Free State, South Africa, and recipient of the 2018 Cape Town Ibali Storytelling Training Award. Her work centres on higher education, migration, youth, and development in Sub-Saharan Africa, and is interested in engaging creative participatory methodologies to bridge the gap between researchers and development practitioners and civil society at large.

Storytelling as a research methodology

Alison Buckler — Tue, 20 Sep 2022 15:45:52 +0000

This podcast episode is a conversation with the team working on the Ibali network Project. The Ibali Network is a collective of researchers from the UK, Nigeria and South Africa. The team uses storytelling to explore commonalities and differences of how inclusion and exclusion are experienced across education systems in South Africa, Nigeria and the UK, combined with a critical, ethnographic evaluation of the storytelling research process. The study aims to understand how storytelling could be better and more ethically used in research, especially when working across socio-political and geographic boundaries.

Transcript

Ibali: co-creating learning spaces in and through storytelling research activities��

Alison Buckler — Thu, 18 Aug 2022 14:13:10 +0000

Image Source: Yusra Price

In the ‘Experiencing Education Partnerships’ Sub-theme at the ��Ĵ�ý 2022 conference, we will do a creative session on storytelling as a research approach, drawing on our experiences of using the approach in international research. Participants are invited to engage with a series of interactive and creative techniques like those that we have employed in our research with a view to exploring and reflecting on the collaborative processes of storytelling for learning and knowledge production in practice.

Using storytelling to understand how people make sense of their world is increasingly presented as a tool for providing richer insights into international education and development challenges. Advocates claim that it is inclusive, flattens hierarchies of power within research, connects elements of a situation, is enjoyable, therapeutic, sparks personal, social and political change, aligns with indigenous ontologies, exposes and challenges majority narratives and lifts research out of exclusionary academic spaces to engage wider publics. However, storytelling research also carries risks in relation to participant and facilitator well-being and the reproduction of static and potentially problematic ways of knowing. In this creative session at ��Ĵ�ý 2022, we aim to highlight and generate insights into this creative research approach.

We are a collective of academics and practitioners with extensive experience of leading and co-facilitating storytelling research projects, including our current AHRC-funded study that uses storytelling to explore commonalities and differences of how inclusion and exclusion are experienced across education systems in South Africa, Nigeria and the UK, combined with a critical, ethnographic evaluation of the storytelling research process. The study aims to understand how storytelling could be better and more ethically used in research, especially when working across socio-political and geographic boundaries.

Our session will draw on two key features of our work that connect to the conference theme of “Partnerships in Education”. The first is our multi-country make-up as a collective of researchers from South Africa, Nigeria and the UK, and our experiences of working together to develop ideas around storytelling research. In this respect our proposed session aligns with the subtheme “Experiencing Education Partnerships”. The second feature is the positioning of our work within a capability and sociocultural framing that draws on Etienne Wenger’s conceptualisation of learning as a participatory process of becoming. The conceptual notion of partnerships in research is also aligned with sociocultural understandings of learning in a collective such as ours which Boaventura de Sousa Santos refers to as a ‘translational contact zone’ involving the meeting, exchange, contestation and assimilation of ideas and knowledges from multiple cultural codes. It further ties into our storytelling approach itself which builds on our collaborator Joanna Wheeler’s work and focuses on lived experiences developed through an iterative group process. Crucially, our approach views storymaking and storytelling as sociocultural activities – that is, as collaborative processes, even when the story is inherently personal. The iterative process of story generation around a specific issue is part of a process of articulating one’s own identity in relation to this issue but at the same time, through the collective process, gaining insights into how these experiences relate to wider trends. Here too our work strongly aligns with the “Experiencing Education Partnerships” sub-theme, with its emphasis on personal and collective experiences of learning: in our storytelling research, partnership is framed as co-creation of knowledge through a group process.

The session is a 90-minute workshop designed to give participants an opportunity to use a series of creative techniques that are similar to those we use in in-depth storytelling processes. In taking a learning-by-doing approach, we intend for the session to generate reflections on the use of storytelling as a research approach, how creative techniques reflect different sociocultural understandings, and what a translational contact zone feels like in practice. These issues are especially relevant given a growing interest in working collaboratively across contexts.

Image source: Jane Nebe

Participants will be invited to join at least two interactive storymaking activities involving image association, telling stories from images, developing comic strips and making storycubes. Facilitators and participants will work together to engage in these fun, art-based exercises which incorporate story elements of character, place, and emotion to surface the different ways that we interpret images and how we put these into a story. We will also screen two digital stories produced through our previous research, to help inform the overall discussion about the methodology.

Overall, we are passionate about storytelling research and are particularly drawn to its collaborative nature. However, we recognise that more critical work needs to be done to support researchers to engage in storytelling research processes – and storytelling research partnerships – that are more epistemologically, geo-politically and ethically informed. This is crucial when working across contexts and more so, under the banner of so-called ‘development’ work – under which much international education research currently sits. In this session we aim to bring the core conversations that underpin our critical storytelling research study to the ��Ĵ�ý community, with the intention of enriching and furthering these conversations alongside fun and interactive practical activities.

��Ĵ�ý Creative sessions: What do innovative spaces look like?

Alison Buckler — Wed, 06 Apr 2022 09:11:37 +0000

We’ve had a long wait for the ��Ĵ�ý Conference at Edinburgh after ��Ĵ�ý 2020 was cancelled due to the pandemic. But ��Ĵ�ý 2022 is coming back with style and lots of innovative ideas to make the conference more diverse, inclusive and inspiring than ever.

��Ĵ�ý has a tradition of surprising audiences through its annual Presidential Keynote Address (given alternately at the ��Ĵ�ý and UKFIET conferences). You may remember Professor Pauline Rose’s keynote in 2017 which included a dance workshop followed by a led by the amazing Kenyan dancer Michael Wamaya, or Professor Anna Robinson-Pant’s in 2019 in which actors, planted around the room, popped up to tell stories of educational inclusion.

This year we are handing the creative baton to our participants by including a call for proposals for “creative spaces”. These ask for ‘any format or structure’ that encourages people to come together to ‘communicate, reflect and learn’. But what does this mean? It might feel intimidating to submit something too far away from the more formal sessions one might expect at a conference, and the idea of creativity might assume that it requires some sort of artistic aptitude… you may be worrying: what if my idea isn’t what the conference committee had in mind?

Well, to reassure any potential creative session proposers, this really is as open to interpretation as the call for abstracts suggests. Dancing flash-mobs and acted stories are still an option! But it could also be something much more low key. The intention is to create spaces for people to come together to make learning experiential, for us to employ our hearts and our hands as well (or instead of) our heads. This could take any form. For example, it might incorporate sound, craft, storytelling, music, movement, games, visual activities, or just alternative ways of talking to each other that encourages us to collectively reflect on the conference theme of education partnerships from different angles and in new ways. Sessions could be examples of embodied practices, reflections on artistic forms, artivism, or spaces to ground ourselves. The scope is huge, and we are genuinely open to interesting and novel ideas that people, far more creative than us, might dream up.

Eleanor Brown (University of York) and Alison Buckler (The Open University)

Storytelling research in international education and development: a resistance to, or reproduction of coloniality?

Alison Buckler — Thu, 03 Feb 2022 12:56:29 +0000

Storytelling is gaining popularity as a methodology in the field of international education and development. It is seen to offer an antidote to modernist, big-data research that positions people at the centre of interventions as homogenous and, instead, connect the field with ‘real’ versions of people. Advocates claim that it is inclusive, flattens hierarchies of power within research, is enjoyable, therapeutic, highlights inequality, sparks personal, social and political change, aligns with indigenous ontologies, reveals minority narratives while exposing and challenging majority narratives and lifts research out of exclusionary academic spaces to engage wider publics.

We are a collective of education and inclusion researchers working in Nigeria, South Africa and the UK embarking on a new AHRC-funded project on storytelling. Through our research using storytelling approaches across a range of studies, over several decades, we have seen evidence of its positive potential. But we have also seen that positive outcomes are not always guaranteed. Storytelling research carries risks in relation to ethics, participant and facilitator well-being, the reproduction of colonial ways of generating knowledge and the reproduction of colonial domination over ways of knowing. The idealisation of storytelling research can reinforce inequality rather than challenge it.

We met through the Ibali Network – an AHRC/GCRF-funded initiative that brought together storytelling academics and practitioners from across the world (but with a particular focus on Sub-Saharan Africa). Through Ibali we identified that early career education and development researchers in African institutions are often steered towards data sciences and away from the creative arts. When storytelling is positioned as an ‘appropriate’ and ‘traditional’ approach for research in lower-income countries, but students in higher-income countries are privileged in relation to learning about creative, arts-based approaches, it entrenches the idea that not only are the ‘solutions’ to challenges in education seen to lie within higher-income country institutions, the capacity for researching these challenges creatively is too.

Furthermore, there is at least an element of transparency around how the ‘big data’ that dominates much of international education and development research limits diverse ways of knowing. We suggest that the framing of storytelling by higher-income countries (especially those which have a history of colonial domination) as an appropriate research approach for lower-income countries (especially those which have been colonised) gives the impression of valuing diverse ways of knowing, but risks controlling what kinds of stories and storytelling are used and/or are useful. Many storytelling approaches in development research draw on techniques popularised in the 1970s and 1980s by high-income country researchers and practitioners, which echoes what Sally Falk Moore called an ‘inescapable epistemological paradox’: mediating indigenous ways of knowing through non-indigenous means. Shenila Khoja-Moolji suggests that development research that platforms ‘voice’ represents an obsession with dialogue and is often used in a way that is incompatible with the epistemologies and genuine needs of research participants. Storyfied depictions of lives can be tokenistic, romanticised or reductive (or all three). On the other hand, as argued by Linda Tuhiwai Smith and Boaventura de Sousa Santos, the use of more ‘authentic’ and ‘local’ storytelling approaches carries risks of exploitation, co-optation and appropriation.

So, does storytelling research reproduce or resist coloniality? The question can feel paralysing, but we are working together to respond to this question by interrogating, challenging, refining and improving our storytelling practice. We are developing a storytelling research study with young people and teachers in Nigeria, South Africa and the UK that is empirically focussed on ideas and experiences of educational inclusion/exclusion. However, in parallel we are planning a critical exploration of this storytelling work, undertaken by three ethnographers trained in the UK, South Africa and Nigeria respectively. The ethnographers will individually and collaboratively document and analyse the storytelling process in each country. They will explore how researchers and participants from different contexts and in different contexts make sense of storytelling as a meaningful approach to researching and articulating people’s lived experiences.

We do not consider this to be an autoethnography, but an iterative, critically reflective and dialogical research design where we are committed to learning about how we carry out and communicate storytelling research and committed to sharing this learning by researching ‘in the open’. We will do this through an online Storytelling Research Hub (coming soon!) which will bring together ideas and debates on different ways of using story in education and development research, and the challenges, strategies and possibilities involved. The Hub will also showcase ideas from across our network around how researchers and practitioners can work more critically and creatively with storytelling approaches in specific contexts.

Ultimately, while we are passionate about storytelling research, we recognise that more critical work needs to be done to support researchers to engage in a process that is more epistemologically, geo-politically and ethically informed – especially when they are working across contexts and especially when they are working under the banner of ‘development’ work.

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Alison Buckler

Jennifer Agbaire

Jennifer Agbaire is a Lecturer in Education at the Faculty of Wellbeing, Education and Language Studies at The Open University. She currently Chairs the Open University’s Masters in Education Stage 2 Inclusive Practice module and is the Deputy Chair of the dissertation module. She also co-leads Early Career Researcher (ECR) development at the OU’s Centre for the Study of Global Development (CSGD). Her teaching, research, impact and knowledge exchange work centre issues of social inequalities, educational inclusion, equity and social justice – her work particularly stem from her interest in marginalised identities. Jennifer’s interest and work also extends to community-centred creative, co-creative and innovative research approaches as well as the ethics and inclusivity of research and professional practices. She is involved in interdisciplinary and multi-partnership projects in these areas, with experience that spans access, policy, leadership, teaching and teacher education across all levels of education.

Joanna Wheeler

Joanna is founder and director of TransformativeStory. Her current work focuses on how storytelling can cross social divides and challenge dominant political narratives of exclusion. Over the last 18 years, she has conducted more than 80 storytelling processes around the world, combining personal and collective forms of storytelling using drawing, dance, music, drama, photography, video, audio, and sculpture. She has worked with a wide range of groups, from activists against sexual violence in Cape Town to young people from southern Africa working for gender equity.

Faith W Mkwananzi

Yusra Price

Yusra is an independent anthropologist, educator, researcher and facilitator who cannot settle on a single occupation but dabbles in many interrelated work practices. She holds a Masters in Anthropology from the University of Cape Town (UCT) and specializes in Education and Storytelling. At tertiary education level, her current focus is on pedagogy of methodologies within anthropology and the broader social sciences. She is interested in how researchers are cultivated and in the kinds of innovations educators have developed to foster research sensibilities that are contextually and ethically driven. She is a member and lead ethnographer for the iBali network, supported by The Open University, which will use a storytelling for transformation approach to understand inclusion and exclusion in education across South Africa, Nigeria and the United Kingdom. Her storywork is located in community engagement and advocacy where a participatory and people-centred approach tries to assist others in achieving social justice.

Compare: Journal of Comparative and International Education – A reflection on the 50th Anniversary Retrospective

Alison Buckler — Fri, 21 May 2021 09:47:41 +0000

As the Compare journal approached its 50^th anniversary, a study was commissioned to celebrate the milestone. A competitive tender for authorship was launched with the brief that the study should capture a sense of what Compare had come from, where it was now, and how it might develop in the future.

The commission was awarded to an international team, based in the US. The panel was impressed by the multidimensional methodology and appreciated the team’s commitment to working with junior scholars (including an explicit plan to appropriately reimburse and accredit their contribution). The study took place during 2020 and adopted a time-series analysis of Compare issues dating back to its first issue in a modern journal format in 1975, with a three-prong analysis approach including descriptive (to provide an overview of key features of ��ǳ��貹��’s publication history), spectral (to examine trends and cycles within the overarching data set) and explanative (to situate the journal’s activities in the wider field of comparative and international education). A further thematic analysis of editorials was undertaken to trace ‘understandings of key conceptual pillars throughout the journal’s history’ (p.11). The resulting report is comprehensive and provides a broad and detailed data set around different dimensions of ��ǳ��貹��’s history.

It is poignant that ��ǳ��貹��’s juncture of a half century and subsequent opportunity for contemplation of past, present and future came in a year in which academics were forced to pause and reflect on so many other levels: the uncertainties of Brexit and its implications for travel, funding and collaboration; the industrial action that saw us standing in sleeting rain asking people to re-think the shape of higher education; the increased attention on Black Lives Matter and anti-colonial movements that galvanised difficult questions on complexity and complicity around the preservation of the status quo in education and development agendas and in our institutions; and the Covid-19 pandemic, limiting our opportunities to connect and learn, but also forcing us to think about new ways that connecting and learning could be possible.

As the incoming Vice Chair of the ��Ĵ�ý – with which Compare is affiliated – I intended to write a summary of the report for the new ��Ĵ�ý blog. This seemed a fairly straightforward plan until, as the year progressed, it became impossible to reflect on a report about the state of comparative and international education in 2020 without reflecting on it through the lens of 2020 itself. In this post, therefore, I present three interconnected reflections and some suggestions that the journal could take forward.

***

The first reflection is around where Compare stands, and what it stands for. The report summarises key stages and debates in the history of comparative and international education (CIE), including a consideration of the benefits of its ‘amorphous’ nature (p.4) in terms of welcoming epistemic diversity and interdisciplinarity, balanced against the risk of lack of coherence due to the absence of a standard, universally agreed-upon definition. Within this complex landscape the authors position ��ǳ��貹��’s own ‘distinctive identity’ (p.4) connecting the fields of comparative education and education for international development. They highlight the opportunities for Compare enabled by the inclusivity of this bridging position, as well as the frustrations of not being explicitly able to distinguish itself from either field. In recent years the expansion of research within CIE with a foot solidly in the ‘development’ camp seems evident, although the report’s data on title keywords suggests that in Compare there has actually been a drop off: development was in the top five words in the 1980s, 1990s and peaking in the 2000s, but did not even appear in the top ten in the 2010s (p.26-27). The drop-off could signify the growing critique of ‘development’ and contributors’ reluctance to visibly associate with it in the title of their piece rather than an actual reduction in articles focussed on development issues. I also wondered if terms such as ‘professional development’ or ‘teacher development’ bumped development misleadingly up the charts during the peak.

The authors also provide a thought-provoking parallel history of Compare and the broader history of CIE. As would be expected – given the occasion of the 50^th anniversary – they begin the narrative with the ‘CIE for self-improvement’ phase of the late 1960s, i.e. people travelled to other places to observe education systems with the intention of bringing back ideas for how they could improve their own. The authors position the contemporary field as a phase of ‘contextualisation of CIE’ – a desire to understand the educational world better through comparison. This sounds plausible but also, perhaps, a somewhat sanitised version of the field’s trajectory. Given the increasing overlap between CIE and development studies and the report’s data that shows how academics affiliated with institutions in high income countries still dominate the lead author spot (76 percent in the 2010s), while nearly half of articles (46.5 percent) have a lower income country as its focus, the shift could perhaps be seen differently: in the 1960s people studied education systems in other countries for self-improvement, a contemporary intention for many people studying education systems in other countries is improving them.

One way of addressing this imbalance is to diversify the authorship to ensure a greater balance between country focus and author affiliation. Compare has a long-standing commitment to this, as we’ll see in the next section. I would suggest an additional and more radical step would be to fund studies and call for articles that invert the lens: where authors from institutions in lower income countries research and write about education systems in high income countries. As far as I can see from the data in the report, this is an almost invisible dynamic across ��ǳ��貹��’s history.

***

The second reflection is around ��ǳ��貹��’s long history of seeking diversity in both contributors and readership. The report suggests that while Compare has always embraced its capacity to appeal to diverse audiences, it was in the 1990s that editors began to explicitly capitalise on this potential for diverse ways of knowing. This was articulated through pushes to include a wider range of methodological, theoretical and conceptual approaches, a wider range of countries as the focus of research, and the inclusion of voices that had been ‘historically neglected from academic publishing’ (p.31). Moves included the promotion of research conducted by non-academics and the introduction of the Compare Forum: an ‘‘innovative practice to include additional perspectives’ (p.11). The addition of PhD dissertation summaries was a way of diversifying outputs, engaging and showcasing the field’s future professionals, and ensuring more inclusive and supportive reviewing for this cohort.

The report captures some of this diversity through the data generated around the more than 1000 Compare articles published since 1975 – although this comprehensive coding exercise did not include PhD extracts or Forum pieces; the inclusion of which were at the heart of ��ǳ��貹��’s explicit showcasing of the breadth and inclusiveness of CIE.

Through my involvement with Compare, the commitment of the current Editors to reframe the journal’s identity in ways that are less visibly captured in statistics is clear: diversifying authorship does not necessarily address epistemic dominance. Making space for new ideas is as important as ensuring a range of contributors. It will be a key responsibility of the new Editors to continue and expand these efforts to shift the balance of educational thinking. An interesting area to explore in this respect could be the encouragement of articles that compare places in high income and lower income countries: only four percent of articles across ��ǳ��貹��’s entire publication history have done this. Thinking about how this could be done in a way that does not assert a ‘western’ approach to understanding global education dynamics, but also does not entrench a polarisation of epistemology (these ideas for these countries / these other ideas for these other countries) seems to be an important way forward for the field.

***

My final reflection is around how the data in the report (perhaps unintentionally) demonstrates the increasing pace and panic of academia, and the impact of this on workload and work-type. It does this in several ways. First it illustrates the rapid growth of Compare since the 1970s. For its first two decades Compare published two issues a year. In the 1990s a third issue was added. By 2020 the journal was publishing eight issues a year. In terms of individual outputs, this represents an increase from 63 to 428 articles per decade (p.17). I know from my ‘behind the scenes’ work with the journal that this only represents a fraction of articles received. Of course, this is a positive reflection on the growth of CIE and the huge numbers of interesting and high-quality research being submitted. But when combined with other metrics and observations a slightly different picture emerges.

For example, the report shows that, for the first three decades of ��ǳ��貹��’s history, review articles (or ‘think pieces’) counted for more than half of its publications, with nearly 90 percent of articles published in the 1990s falling within this category. In the 2010s, the last decade of the study, review articles constituted just over 20 percent. The authors attribute this to the increasing scientisation of the field, but I would suggest this could go one step further and be linked partly to the pressures of the REF for UK-based academics (it is easier to explicitly demonstrate 3* rigour and originality with an empirical piece than a think-piece), and partly to the increased expectation that academics also blog (a ‘micro’ think piece takes less time to write and can receive much more global and immediate traction than a longer piece locked away behind a paywall).

Finally, as the report outlines, issues of Compare no longer include ‘commentary and reflective’ editorial pieces (p.35). The authors do not go into the reasons for this, although it would be reasonable to assume that writing eight editorials per year would be unfeasible, and it frees up space for more articles. But together, these shifts in the journal’s scale and outputs track and illustrate academia’s increasing demand for constant, rapid production, quite likely at the expense of opportunities for deeper, slower critique and contemplation. So, my final challenge to the Editors is to consider what Compare could do, as it enters its second half century, to reclaim these opportunities as a push-back to the intense pressures of higher education and pay tribute to the contemplative focus of its original issues.

Dr Alison Buckler, The Open University, ��Ĵ�ý Vice Chair

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