“A score of prominent educators from South Europe and the Middle East and North Africa region speak about their upbringing, their educational and professional journeys, their academic achievements, and their struggles in order to enhance democracy, justice and equity in their countries and across the Mediterranean. The interviews in this volume shed light on educational movements, challenges, and aspirations in a region that is attaining increasing importance geo-politically, and in comparative and international studies. These are powerful and critical voices, providing readers with fresh, often unexpected insights about contexts, cultures, and convictions that deserve global attention. The interviews with these men and women inform, intrigue, but above all inspire, calling, as they do, for an earnest commitment to a vision of education as a transformative, democratising force. In contrast to the global, totalising discourse that has increasingly defined education in narrowly economistic terms, here are the beginnings of alternative agendas, inviting citizens to ‘read’ and decode the world around them, and to confront power, wherever it lies. In doing so, the educators in this volume draw upon and put at our disposal a wide array of theoretical lenses, nimbly weaving these within a narrative that speaks about a lifetime lived in the hope of making a difference. These, then, are vivid, engaging, and reflexive accounts, emerging from contexts where democracy has only recently taken root, if at all, and from a region that has come to symbolize the return of the political, and the reclaiming of the public sphere as a site for transformation, contestation, revolt, and hope.”

Editors Robert F. Arnove and Carlos Alberto Torres, along with new coeditor Stephen Franz, have assembled the key scholars in comparative education, bringing a new edition of their groundbreaking book. To be used in graduate courses in comparative education, the new edition re...

This book brings together in one volume a selection of the best articles that have appeared in the Mediterranean Journal of Educational Studies, whose first issue appeared in 1996. Each chapter highlights challenges faced by education systems across the region.

Perhaps no other challenge preoccupies governments and citizens in the Mediterranean region than the mass unemployment of young people, many of who have invested in higher education in the hope that ability and effort lead to fulfilling lives. Transitions to independent adulthood are, however, frustratingly long drawn-out, and often jeopardised by labour markets that are neither youth-friendly nor meritocratic. While such challenges require structural responses at the macro-economic level, career education and guidance have an important role to play in addressing both the public and private good, and in furthering the social justice agenda. This volume provides a state-of-the-art review of career education and guidance in Southern Europe and the Middle East and North Africa Region, presenting a multi-faceted portrayal of the situation in each country as well as overviews of cross-cutting themes that are especially relevant to context, such as women’s career development in the Arab states, job placement support for refugees, and the impact of faith on livelihood planning. “This book is a major achievement, focusing on a pivotal part of the world.” – Tony Watts, Cambridge, UK “This book challenges career guidance to truly think in a contextual, localised, plural and dialogical way. In providing an opportunity for the South to speak on its own terms it helps renew the field through different ways of thinking and doing career guidance.” – Marcelo Afonso Ribeiro, University of São Paulo, Brazil “This wonderful new book furnishes a way forward in helping people and communities establish practices that will support our natural striving for work that is decent, dignified, and meaningful.” – David L. Blustein, Boston College, USA “This book is packed with fresh ideas based on lucid arguments that draw from a substantial evidence base. This work is essential reading.” – Gideon Arulmani, The Promise Foundation, Bangalore, India “This publication is a must-read for every individual involved in policy, research and practice activities in the career guidance field.” – Rènette du Toit, Independent Research Services, South Africa

"This book brings together new thinking on education’s complex and evolving role in conflict and fragility. The changing nature of conflict, from inter- to intra-state, and with shifting geopolitical power balances, demands a reconceptualization of where education is positioned. Claims that education on its own can be an agent of conflict transformation are disputed. Deliberate attempts at peace education are not without critics and controversies. This collection aims to generate new realism from empirical and reflective accounts in a variety of countries and political contexts, as well as provide innovative methodological approaches to the study of education and conflict. The particular distinctiveness of the volume is the emphasis on ‘contested’ – it includes the debates and disagreements on the many faces of education in conflict, as well as material on teaching controversial issues in fragile contexts. Crucially, it underscores how education itself exists within highly contested projects of state, nation and region building. As well as overview comparative chapters, the collection encompasses a range of specific contexts, geographically and educationally – Algeria, Canada, El Salvador, Israel, Kenya, Mexico, Morocco, Nepal, Tunisia, UK and US, with settings that include schools, higher education and refugee camps. Focuses range from analyses of education in historical conflicts to contemporary issues such as post Arab Spring transformations. Perennial concerns about religion, colonialism, protest, integration, cohesion, emergencies, globalization and narrative are given new slants. Yet in spite of the debates, a cross-cutting consensus emerges as the crucial need for critical pedagogy and critical theory if education is to make any mark at all on conflict and fragility. "

This title brings together contributions from around the world that analyse and reflect on the way curriculum is configuring and reconfiguring that world.

At a time when the Mediterranean has rediscovered its own vitality, seven academics from the fields of education and literature look at how fictions set in the region narrate the role of the teacher from the point of view of the students and from that of the teachers themselves. While an increasingly technocratic approach to the performance of teachers focuses on competences, these often highly subjective narratives tell stories of practitioners who refuse to fit into the mould imposed on them by patriarchy or the educational institutions. The writers dealt with in this volume are aware that teachers cannot be solely defined in terms of what they are expected to do within schools and classrooms. This reductively conceives them as simply needing the skills to teach without having the ability to contextualise their teaching within wider historical, social and cultural realities. With its migration flows and intricate web of social and cultural politics, the Mediterranean of the 21st century is an ideal space for reflections on the role of the teacher in an ever-changing society.

The world ecological system is marked by difference throughout. There is social difference with different identities, shifting and transmuting, being forged, and extra-human differences. All these have implications for intra human and human/non-human earth relations. This aspect is not always recognised and valorised. Education, though not an independent variable, still can be mobilised, together with other sources of potential transformation, to redress this situation marked by aggressions, micro and macro, inertia and indifference. It represents a number of immediate challenges for Adult Education. This compendium is intended as a useful resource in this regard. It maps out a kaleidoscope of myriad differences and suggests options for overcoming the various obstacles that stand opposed to those who seek fulfilment in the way they are discursively located. The obstacles are a dent on efforts to living in communion with the rest of the cosmos. The utopian view is that of different species living in harmony with each other. This book emphasises social/ecological justice, intersectionality and relationality as the targets for Adult Education in this relatively still new millennium. Contributors are: Sharifah Salmah Binti Abdullah, Thi Bogossian, Lauren Bouttell, Lidiane Nunes de Castro, Anyela Nathalie Gomez Deantonio, Preeti Dagar, Raquel Galeano Giminez, Ksenija Joksimović, Kainat Khurshid, Robert Livingston, Peter Mayo, Sonia Medel, Yunah Park, Zainab Sa’id Sa’ad, Bonnie Slade, Gameli Kodzo Tordzro, Agnieszka Uflewska and Aisara Yessenova.

In doing so, it considers some thorny issues at the forefront of education policy and provision: The increasing competitive stratification within education systems ; The impact of governments who have put competition in the labour market at the heart of their policies ; Social control of potentially disruptive groups, social cohesion and the human rights agenda ; The expansion of a special education industry driven by the needs of middle class, aspirant and knowledgeable parents, anxious about the success of their 'less able' children. Written by an internationally renowned scholar, Ignorant Yobs?: Low Attainers in a Global Knowledge Economy synthesises a range of complex, highly topical issues and suggests how those with learning difficulties might, with government and employer support, contribute to a flexible labour market.

How Israeli universities collaborate in Israeli state violence against Palestinians Israeli universities have long enjoyed a reputation as liberal bastions of freedom and democracy. Drawing on extensive research and making Hebrew sources accessible to the international community, Maya Wind shatters this myth and documents how Israeli universities are directly complicit in the violation of Palestinian rights. As this book shows, Israeli universities serve as pillars of Israel's system of oppression against Palestinians. Academic disciplines, degree programs, campus infrastructure, and research laboratories all service Israeli occupation and apartheid, while universities violate the rights of Palestinians to education, stifle critical scholarship, and violently repress student dissent. Towers of Ivory and Steel is a powerful expose of Israeli academia’s ongoing and active complicity in Israel’s settler-colonial project.