Education Poverty & International Development (EPID):
Routledge Series
Series Editors: Madeleine Arnot and Christopher Colclough
Centre for Education and International Development, Faculty of Education University of Cambridge
The series offers important theoretical and methodological frameworks for the study of developing-country education systems, in the context of national cultures and ambitious global agendas. It aims to identify the key policy challenges associated with addressing social inequalities, uneven social and economic development and the opportunities to promote democratic and effective educational change.
The series brings together researchers from the fields of anthropology, economics, development studies, educational studies, politics international relations and sociology. It represents a unique opportunity to publish work by some of the most distinguished writers in the fields of education and development along with that of new authors working on important empirical projects. The series contributes important insights on the linkages between education and society based on inter-disciplinary, international and national studies.
Sharp, critical and innovative studies are sought that are likely to have a strategic influence upon the thinking of academics and policy-makers. They may include critical syntheses of existing research and policy, innovative research methodologies, and in-depth evaluations of major policy developments. Some studies will address topics relevant to poverty alleviation, national and international policy-making and aid, whilst others may represent anthropological or sociological investigations on how education works or does not work within local communities, for households living in poverty or for particular socially marginalised groups. Preference will be given to studies with a comparative international approach although some single-country studies will be considered, where they raise interesting theoretical and policy issues with clear relevance for international audiences.
Published Books:
- Education For All and the marginalisation of mobile pastoralists
- Professional Education, Capabilities and the Public Good
- Learner-centred Education in International Perspective: Whose pedagogy for whose development?
- Education Quality and Social Justice in the Global South: Challenges for policy, practice and research
- Teacher Education and the Challenge of Development: A Global Analysis
- Education Outcomes and Poverty: A Reassessment
Forthcoming Books:
- Gender Violence in Poverty Contexts: The educational challenge
- The ‘Poor Child’: The cultural politics of education, development and childhood
- Gender, Education and Poverty: The politics of policy implementation
Each of the above books are described below and linked to the Routledge website:
Education For All and the marginalisation of mobile pastoralists
Current paradigms of ‘development’ generally serve mobile pastoralist groups poorly: their visibility in policy processes is minimal, and their mobility is constructed by the powerful as a ‘problem’, rather than as a rational livelihood strategy. Increasingly damaged eco-systems, shrinking natural resources, globalisation and urbanisation all put pressure on pastoralist livelihoods. Such processes often worsen, rather than alleviate, poverty and socio-economic marginalisation among pastoralists, but they also precipitate engagement with forms of education that may improve their future livelihood security and social status, and enhance occupational diversification.
Opening with a discussion of how the relationships between education, poverty and development have been conceived in dominant development discourses, this book reviews the disappointing international experience of education provision to mobile pastoralist groups. It highlights a lack of sufficient flexibility and relevance to changing livelihoods and, more fundamentally, education’s conceptual location within a sedentarist paradigm of development that is antagonistic to mobility as a legitimate livelihood strategy. These global themes are examined in India, where policy and practices of education inclusion for mobile, marginalised groups are critiqued. Empirically-based chapters drawing on ethnographic research, provide detailed insights into how the Rabaris of Kachchh – a pastoralist community in Gujarat, Western India – engage with education as a social and economic development strategy for both adults and children, and show how ethnographic and participatory research approaches can be used for policy advocacy for marginalised groups.
http://www.routledge.com/books/details/9780415585903/
Published May 28th 2014 by Routledge
Professional Education, Capabilities and the Public Good
The role of universities in promoting human development
By Melanie Walker, Monica McLean
This book innovatively explores how universities might be engines of reform and be directed towards social change. Using rich case studies drawn from South African research, the book comprehensively provides a myriad of new perspectives on what constitutes a set of appropriate public-good professional capabilities that will translate successfully into contributions to human development. It challenges universities to produce professionals who have the knowledge, skills and values to improve the lives of people living in poverty in urban and rural settings.
By drawing on an approach that focuses on differing public-good professional capabilities in five professions, this book produces a crucial new framework for the preparation of professionals relevant to the global study of higher education policy. It expands higher education’s contribution to global social justice beyond a concern with human capital, administering a challenge to higher education internationally to address human development in the 21st century.
Published September 2nd 2013 by Routledge
Learner-centred Education in International Perspective
Whose pedagogy for whose development?
By Michele Schweisfurth
Is learner-centred education appropriate for all societies and classrooms?
Learner-centred education (LCE) is a travelling policy, widely promoted by international agencies and national governments. Arguments in favour of this pedagogical tradition refer to theories and evidence from cognitive psychology, claiming that all learners can benefit equally from its judicious use. Beyond the benefits to the individual however, lie a set of assumptions about learner-centred education as a foundation for the building of democratic citizens and societies, suitable for economies of the future. These promises have been questioned by critics who doubt that it is appropriate in all cultural and resource contexts, and there is considerable evidence in the global South of perennial problems of implementation.
In the light of these debates, is LCE still a good development ‘bet’? This book provides an authoritative and balanced investigation of these issues, exploring the contextual factors from global movements to local resourcing realities which have fuelled it as a discourse and affected its practice. In the light of the theoretical underpinnings and research evidence, the book addresses pressing questions: to what extent is learner-centred education a sound choice for policy and practice in developing countries? And if it is a sound choice, under which conditions is it a viable one?
Published March 6th 2013 by Routledge
Education Quality and Social Justice in the Global South
Challenges for policy, practice and research
Edited by Leon Tikly, Angeline M. Barrett
How we understand education quality is inextricably linked with perspectives on social justice. Questions of inclusion, relevance and democracy in education are increasingly contested, most especially in the global South, and improving the quality of education, particularly for the most disadvantaged, has become a topic of fundamental concern for education policy makers, practitioners and the international development community. The reality experienced by many learners continues to be of inadequately prepared and poorly motivated teachers, struggling to deliver a rapidly changing curriculum without sufficient support, and often using outmoded teaching methods in over-crowded or dilapidated classrooms.
Education Quality and Social Justice in the South includes contributions from leading scholars in the field of education and development. The text draws upon state of the art evidence from the five year EdQual research programme, which focuses upon raising achievement in low income countries, and demonstrates how systems of high quality universal education can be sustained.
Published 2013 by Routledge
Teacher Education and the Challenge of Development
A Global Analysis
Edited by Bob Moon
In developing countries across the world, qualified teachers are a rarity, with thousands of untrained adults taking over the role and millions of children having no access to schooling at all. The supply of high-quality teachers is falling behind: poor status, low salaries and inadequate working conditions characterise perceptions of teachers in numerous countries, deterring many from entering the profession, and there are strong critiques of the one dimensional, didactic approach to pedagogic practice. Despite this, millions of teachers are dedicated to educating a newly enfranchised generation of learners.
Teacher Education and the Challenge of Development is co-written by experts working across a wide range of developing country situations. It provides a unique overview of the crisis surrounding the provision of high-quality teachers in the developing world, and how these teachers are crucial to the alleviation of poverty. The book explores existing policy structures and identifies the global pressures on teaching, which are particularly acute in developing economies.
Published August 16th 2012 by Routledge
Education Outcomes and Poverty
A Reassessment
Edited by Christopher Colclough
What do we know about the outcomes of education in developing countries? Where are the gaps in our knowledge, and why are they important to fill? What are the policy challenges that underlie these knowledge gaps, and how can education best contribute to eliminating the problem of widespread poverty in the developing world?
This book arises out of a five year, DFID-funded programme of research examining the impact of education on the lives and livelihoods of people in developing countries, particularly those living in poorer areas and from poorer households. Based on highly innovative research that addressed common research questions across four countries in Africa and South Asia, the book presents new theoretical and empirical knowledge that will help to improve education and poverty reduction strategies in developing countries, through an enhanced recognition of education's actual and potential role.
Published June 10th 2012 by Routledge
Forthcoming Books:
Gender Violence in Poverty Contexts: The educational challenge
edited by Jenny Parks
To be published October 1st 2014.
This book is concerned with understanding the complex ways in which gender violence and poverty impact on young people’s lives, and the potential for education to challenge violence. Although there is a growing literature considering the links between violence, gender or poverty and education in developing countries, few studies look at the interconnections between all of these themes. A key premise of the book is that in order to understand the many dimensions of violence in young people’s lives, these interconnections need to be examined. This book is the first major attempt to define the field of gender violence studies in education in poverty contexts. This is achieved by setting out relevant theoretical perspectives, empirical methodologies and case studies of the impact of gender violence on young people’s lives in families, schools and communities.
The ‘Poor Child’: The cultural politics of education, development and childhood
Edited by Lucy Hopkins, Arathi Sriprakash
To Be Published January 14th 2015
This book brings together analytic approaches from childhood studies, sociology, cultural studies and development studies to illustrate the different ways in which the concept of the ‘poor child’ is constructed and mobilised through development policy agendas in different national contexts. It unsettles the simplistic notions of the ‘global’ or ‘universal’ child that appear frequently in development theory and offers an interdisciplinary engagement with research across cultural sites and national contexts. The book brings the figuration of the ‘poor child’ to the centre of its analysis to ask how the child subject is understood in the developing world.
The interdisciplinary approach of the volume offers new insights into the way the constitution of childhood affects children's lives either materially, culturally or educationally. Fresh theoretical and methodological ideas invite the reader to consider a range of frameworks to understand ‘childhoods’ in a variety of national and cultural contexts. The analysis draws on multiple sites of knowledge production and makes use of textual and ethnographic research based in South and South-East Asia, Sub-Saharan Africa, South America, Australia, the UK and USA. Through its focus on childhoods in contexts of poverty, the book critically examines the ways in which ‘development’ itself is constituted within development studies, development policy, and in wider cultural discourses of international development.
Gender, Education and Poverty: The politics of policy implementation
By Elaine Unterhalter, Jenni Karlsson, Amy North
To be published January 31st 2015
Throughout the 1990s an ambitious global process of policy making was associated with the work of UN agencies which believed that global co-ordination and connection was key to dealing with a range of pressing challenges. Gender inequality in education and poverty reduction featured prominently in these concerns and in attendant policy. As 2010 approached and commentators could look back at ten years of the MDG process, a large number of studies were published assessing the successes or difficulties with this framework. However few looked at how it had been interpreted in particular national and sub-national contexts or how staff in different organisations operating at a global level viewed this approach.
This book contributes to filling the gap in the empirical literature. Drawing on case-study research that examined initiatives which engaged with global aspirations to advance gender equality in and through schooling in contexts of poverty in Kenya and South Africa, it looks at how global frameworks on gender, education and poverty are interpreted in local settings and the politics of implementation. It thus sets discussion of the form of global agreements in a particular context, which allows for an appraisal of how they have been understood by the people who implement them. In using an innovative approach to comparative cross country research it illuminates how ideas and actions connect and disconnect around particular meanings of poverty, education and gender in large systems and different settings. Its conclusions will allow assessments of the approach to the post-2015 agenda to be made taking account of how policy and practice relating to global social justice are negotiated, sometimes negated, the forms in which they are affirmed and the actions that might help enhance them.