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Subjects Archives: Education

Education, Schooling, Teaching, etc.

John Dewey, by Sterling Bartlett (Source: http://partiallyexaminedlife.com)

Willetts the Conqueror (part 6) – Academic freedom

Today, academic freedom is increasingly under threat from marketisation, in particular as a result of the mutually reinforcing pressures on academics to meet instrumental, neoliberal economic objectives, imposed from above via national-level performance management systems–the TEF, REF and KEF–and from below through local-level, bureaucracy-heavy managerialism.v

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Karl Marx & The Social Sciences

Karl Marx & the social sciences

In this bicentennial year of Karl Marx’s birth, there has been a great deal of celebration of his work and ideas. Many essays appeared in the global media during the first week of this month –Marx was born on May 05, 1818 – emphasized the relevance of his critique of capitalism even today.

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Whitesplaining (Photo: iStock)

The whitesplaining of history is over

When the academy was the exclusive playground of white men, it produced the theories of race, gender, and Western cultural superiority that underwrote imperialism abroad and inequality at home. In recent decades, women and people of color have been critical to producing new knowledge breaking down those long-dominant narratives. Sociological research confirms that greater diversity […]

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The sausage room at the P & M Packing Company

Willetts the conqueror (part 5): knowledge exchange

In addition to subsumption of teaching and research, the third mission of neoliberal marketisation has been termed, “knowledge exchange.” The introduction of this mission represents not only a fundamental attack on the academic profession, but also a desperate attempt to marshal the knowledge-producing powers of universities to kick-start a stagnating post-crisis global economy.

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FRANCE-LABOUR-STRIKE

50 years after 1968: students strikers attacked again

Not an April Fool’s joke. Here are the facts: Four days ago (March 29) the ultra-conservative Dean of the Montpellier University Law School was summoned to police headquarters, interrogated, hauled into court, and held over in jail for arraignment by the Chief Prosecutor–all on the complaint of nine student strikers, who claim to have been […]

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Student protest

University strikes: where do we go from here?

On February 22nd the University and College Union (UCU) called for the beginning of a nation wide strike in response to Universities UK’s (UUK) attempt to shift of the Universities Superannuation Scheme from a defined benefit pension to a defined contribution pension.

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Teaching by Nick Youngson CC BY-SA 3.0 Alpha Stock Images

Willetts the conqueror (part 3): human capital

The following post is the third instalment of the multi-part review of David Willetts’ ‘A University Life’, you can find here the Introduction; Part 1 and Part 2. Parts 3 and 4 take a slightly different approach, diving deeper into the fundamental principles of marketisation, which centre on the conversion of qualitative experience and practice […]

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