Articles & Chapters by Emma Buchanan
Current Issues in Comparative Education, 2017
The development of "international mindedness" is an established aim of international education an... more The development of "international mindedness" is an established aim of international education and has recently gained prominence in national school systems. Despite its increasing salience, it remains an ambiguous construct and an understudied aspect of schooling. It is implicated in globalized educational markets and attempts to measure international mindedness and its kindred concepts, such as cosmopolitanism, are fraught. Drawing on a study of subjective perceptions of the influence of schooling over the life course, this article explores education for international mindedness. Informed by life history and narrative approaches, it provides an analysis of reflections from people who completed International Baccalaureate (IB) programs from the 1970s to 2010s. Commonalities and differences in narratives of those who attended " international schools " and " national schools " are explored in relation to influences people attribute to shaping their worldviews. The article illustrates the value of qualitative approaches and offers new insights into sociological critiques of international education and international mindedness, grounding and enlivening recent characterizations in complex life histories.
In T. Lightfoot & R. Peach (Ed.), Questioning the Discourses of Human Capital in Early Childhood Education: Reconceptualizing Theory, Policy and Practice. Palgrave Macmillan, Aug 2015
This chapter provides a critical analysis of learning-focused early childhood pedagogies of parti... more This chapter provides a critical analysis of learning-focused early childhood pedagogies of participation and voice. Such pedagogies are often cited as alternatives to the reductive and normalizing tendencies of curriculum approaches governed by economic and human capital rationales. Taking the “Te Whāriki approach” of Aotearoa New Zealand, to early childhood education as a case and applying a Foucauldian analytic to assessment practices, the extent to which learning-focused pedagogies might resist developmental logics is questioned. In contrast to dominant interpretations of the Te Whāriki approach, it is argued that this pedagogy appears to presume and promote calculating and economistic orientations to the self and to the wider world of people, places, and things.
Conference Proceedings (refereed) by Emma Buchanan
Measuring Up: Proceedings of The Philosophy of Education Society of Australasia 43rd Annual Conference , Dec 2013
Questions of measurement permeate all sectors of education. The limiting effects of assessment re... more Questions of measurement permeate all sectors of education. The limiting effects of assessment regimes on curriculum content, student engagement and forms of success have been widely noted, including in relation to early childhood education. ‘Developmental’ observations and assessments of young children have been extensively criticised as limiting, normalising and pathologising. A turn toward context, participation and voice in early education has been posed as ‘a way out’ of this problematic. Aotearoa New Zealand’s socioculturally framed narrative assessment approach exemplifies such a turn. ‘Learning story’ assessments work to foreground, and extend, children’s ‘learning dispositions’. Overwhelmingly, this assessment approach is characterised as empowering, and enabling the development of diverse, ‘competent, confident’ child learners. In this paper, I draw from a recently conducted Foucauldian analysis of early childhood education assessment discourse-practice in New Zealand. Approaching ethics as self constitutive practices, I consider possible ethical and governmental effects of this assessment and pedagogical approach. I argue that the ‘telos’ of this approach appears to be the production of permanently-performing learning subjects. Working with an understanding of ontology as technical, this ‘troubling’ analysis does not, however, involve a call for the removal of regulation, or futures-thinking as a source of direction for conduct in early education per se. By considering the normative conceptions, and technical inscriptions, that are at work in the learning stories approach, my argument troubles its status as empowering practice, and provokes instead, an analysis of issues of measurement and standardisation as they relate to practices of self government and constitution.
Conference Presentations by Emma Buchanan
Book Reviews by Emma Buchanan
International Journal of Equity and Innovation in Early Childhood 11(1), 49-53.
Thesis Chapters by Emma Buchanan
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Articles & Chapters by Emma Buchanan
Conference Proceedings (refereed) by Emma Buchanan
Conference Presentations by Emma Buchanan
Book Reviews by Emma Buchanan
Thesis Chapters by Emma Buchanan