Marc Pruyn

Equality and equity have become dominant discourses within educational policy documents during the last decade. Colombia, for example, has introduced a language policy initiative that purports to provide educational equity opportunities for all through English language environments and opportunities within schools. Drawing on Ball's (1993. "What is Policy?" Discourse 13 (2): 10-17, 2012a. Global Education Inc. London: Routledge, 2013. The Education Debate (2nd ed.). Chicago, IL: The Policy Place.) approach to policy analysis, this article critically interrogates the Colombian National Bilingual Program (PNB, in Spanish) by analysing the ways in which the concepts of (in)equality and (in)equity are addressed. We argue in this article that the PNB misrepresents the concept of equity, presenting a policy that aims to address it but fails to do so. Hence, this study reveals how rhetoric is used to position educators and institutions as accountable for the equal access to learning opportunities and environments that the policy promises. This article builds on the premise that contemporary educational reforms challenge the autonomy of educators, institutions, and local authorities by strengthening their accountability while governmental institutions centralise their authority.

Science, Technology, Engineering, Arts, and Mathematic (STEAM) education in Early Childhood (EC) contexts is an uprising phenomenon and has received considerable attention worldwide. This chapter builds on the premise that ALL children should have access to equitable STEM education—as a matter of social justice and in line with the United Nations Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) 4: Ensure equitable quality education and promote lifelong learning opportunities for all. We investigated the early childhood practitioners' existing knowledge and understanding of STEAM integration practices and the challenges they face as they attempt to integrate STEAM in their classrooms. The chapter focuses on the Australian early childhood education context, curricula frameworks, and 15 Australian early childhood practitioners. The data collection utilized a modified World Café qualitative methodology. The findings of this study highlight the dynamic process of teachers integrating and navigating STEAM.

While ‘teacher-bashing’ and even the ‘teacher-proofing’ of schools and curricula have always been a concern, it took on added resonance from the late 1970s as neoliberalism (an even more aggressive laissez-faire form of free market capitalism than had been the norm since World War II) began to hit its stride in the Regan/Thatcher 1980s (Apple, M. W., 1979). What correspondence theories of the hidden curriculum miss. The Review of Education/Pedagogy/Cultural Studies, 5(2), 101–112.; Giroux, Educational Theory 38:61–75, 1988). This has hardly abated since and has been even more vociferously enacted in today’s climate of authoritarian approaches to and views towards economics, governing, and teaching (McLaren, Post13 digital Science and Education 1:311–334, 2019). Against this backdrop ‘blaming the teacher’ (while simultaneously subjecting public schools to almost endless austerity measures), we have been researching how teachers understand their own ‘lived citizenship identities’ in terms of building collective forms of connection and belonging (Cary & Pruyn, 2021a). The findings presented in this chapter come from a larger international, multi-year, qualitative research endeavour (The Citizenship Project) that has sought to understand the citizenship identities of youth, teachers, parents, and academics.

This book addresses and demonstrates the importance of critical approaches to autoethnography, particularly the commitment that such approaches make to theorizing the personal and to creating work that embodies a social justice ethos. Arts-based and practice-led approaches to this work allow the explanatory power of critical theory to be linked with creative, aesthetically engaging, and personal examples of the ideas at work. By making use of personal stories, critical autoethnography also allows for commenting on, critiquing, and transforming damaging and unjust cultural beliefs and practices by questioning and problematizing the relationships of power that are bound up in these selves, cultures and practices. The essays in this volume provide readers with work that demonstrates how critical autoethnography offers researchers and scholars across multiple disciplines a method for creatively putting critical theory into action. The book will be vital reading for students, researchers and scholars working in the fields of education, communication studies, sociology and cultural anthropology, and the performing arts.

In this chapter, we explore our work as teacher educators who examine the philosophies, meanings and enactments of citizenship in our personal and professional lives and as members of the various communities we inhabit. We do this autoethnographically via various critical analytical lenses in an attempt to self-reflect in a way that helps us to connect more deeply with our university students as we investigate the interconnected and power- and meaning-laden concepts of citizenship, belonging, identity, oppression and empowerment. We see epistemological spaces as discursive productions from post-structural/post-modern and critical perspectives. These positions draw upon the notion of discourse as an absent power that can validate/legitimize or negate/de-legitimize. We present and critique the current literature and juxtapose this with a presentation and analysis of three different “citizenship identity” ethnographic vignettes in an attempt to explore the realms of epistemology through the study of exclusion/inclusion. Specifically, the authors present snippets of their own narrative migration stories, in two instances, and an incident of cross-border identity exploration, in another.

The ideological presence of “whiteness” has always dominated not just the political discourses of most postcolonial societies, but also everyday individual discourses of the subjects within these spaces. We draw upon our experiences as academics in Australia, who choose to stay outside the discourses of power attached to “whiteness.” More specifically, we use our everyday narratives as data, to theorize and trouble the hegemony of “whiteness” in spaces that claim to have cleansed their “race” politics. With the use of Critical Race and Subaltern theories, we also highlight how we are silenced by the power of “whiteness.” As we repeatedly strive to challenge the dominance of “whiteness” in our spaces, we are classified as outcasts due to either our identity or our ideological preferences, by those who resist letting go of their clutch on “white” power. We argue how even our positions of power within the academic environment fail to offer us any protection from ‘“whiteness” attacks, and thereby stimulate conversations with a hope to dismantle the hegemony of “whiteness.” Thus, we narrate how our positions of marginality are repeatedly scrutinized and sanctioned, despite our repeated attempts to disrupt the historical privilege that “whiteness” still holds in these postcolonial spaces. United by this counter-hegemonic quest, we speak as (fe)male voices to surface the discourses of “white” dominance, and make available some of the counter-discourses that can redistribute power through our conscious solidarity. [Note: References available upon request.]

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to understand, more deeply, what the field of citizenship education stands for, in both theory and practice, historically and currently, and especially, in relation
to the new Australian Curriculum: Civics and Citizenship. The authors have drawn on the backgrounds in social studies/social education, multicultural education, democracy education and Indigenous
studies, in order to more deeply and profoundly understand “civics and citizenship education” and what it represents today in Australia.

Design/methodology/approach – Methodologically, the authors see epistemological spaces as discursive productions from post-structural/post-modern and critical perspectives. These positions
draw upon the notion of discourse as an absent power that can validate/legitimize vs negate/de-legitimize. The authors employ a meta-level analysis that historicizes the spaces made possible/impossible
for those in deviant subject positions through a critique of the current literature juxtaposed with a presentation and analysis of “citizenship snapshots” of the authors. In this way, the authors attempt
to move beyond conceptions of deviant citizenship based on curricular content and instructional method, and explore the realms of epistemology through the study of exclusion/inclusion.

Findings – Reflecting the highly personal and individualized nature of the type of research required to be conducted in this aspect of national and personal identity, each of the authors draws here on
personal experiences with aspects of citizenship that are not noticeably present in the current national curriculum. Specifically, the three “citizenship snapshots” at the heart of this paper’s discussion and
analysis – snapshots constructed by academics who both understand and resist the racialised/classed privilege bestowed upon them by nation states – are: “The boomerang citizen”, “privileged and
non-privileged citizen immigrants”, and “Indigenous citizenship, sovereignty & colonialism”.

Originality/value – Drawing both on the current international scholarship on citizenship, power and social changes and the critical/post-structuralist qualitative methodology set forth by the authors, this
work describes and problematizes the evolving “citizenship identities” in an attempt to critically assess the new civics and citizenship component of the Australian curriculum; understand the ongoing
development of national, regional and global “trans/international” citizenship youth identities; and make connections between citizenship education, identity development and the global youth “occupy”/
liberation movements.

This chapter attempts to examine in pedagogical situ and further elaborate the notion of postformal thinking advanced by Joe Kincheloe and Shirley Steinberg (Kincheloe, 1993; Kincheloe & Steinberg, 1993)- and, by way of contrast, the more static and positivistic ways of thinking embodied in formalist views of education. That is, this chapter's main goal will be to hold the theories of formalism and post formalism up to the harsh light of classroom-gathered ethnographic data in order to more fully understand what kinds of environments teachers guided by these divergent knowledges might help to foster (intentionally or otherwise).