Based on intercultural education, socio-cultural analysis, and decolonization and critical pedagogy perspectives, this dissertation explores contradictions in Peruvian intercultural education policy and examines the potential role that African and Afro-Peruvian thought may have in the reform of this policy. Despite redefinitions of the Peruvian state as multicultural/multilingual and the adoption of intercultural concepts in Peruvian education law, the official interpretation of intercultural principles has tended to undermine the social transforming potential implicit in intercultural education. First, official Peruvian education policy overlooks the historical and cultural contributions of non-European and non-Incan social groups. Second, it fails to address inequality and inequity between socio-cultural groups in the access to economic-political resources. Third, it restricts intercultural education programs to Indigenous speaking communities. This study notes how Peruvian intercultural education policy is shaped by state discourses on national identity and by the structure of official Peruvian identity, the Castilian-Inca mestizo entity, and thus ignores Peru's African, Asian, and Middle Eastern roots. By arguing for the inclusion of Afro-Peruvian traditions, this research offers a model for opening intercultural education policy to other excluded socio-cultural groups. Archival and contemporary evidence is used to show how the substantial African presence in Peru has been erased from official history, with negative socio-political consequences for Afro-Peruvians. It presents the philosophical, political, pedagogical, and sociological contributions of the Senegalese Leopold Sedar Senghor (1906–2001), and the Afro-Peruvians Nicomedes Santa Cruz Gamarra (1925–1992) and Jose Carlos Luciano Huapaya (1956–2002) as bases for rethinking Peruvian cultural diversity and intercultural policies from decolonized, democratic, and global perspectives. Further, it presents objections and counter-proposals to intercultural education policies of the Peruvian state that were gathered in a small pilot study of the personnel of the Afro-PeruvianYapatera High School and the nonprofit organizations CEDET and Lundu. Finally, it articulates these counter-proposals with Senghor, Santa Cruz, and Luciano's theoretical inputs for decolonizing and democratizing Peruvian intercultural education policy.

In response to the challenges presented by unprecedented growth in higher education (HE) since 1978, China adopted policy experimentation (PE) as a means of introducing and testing HE reforms. This study involves four in-depth case studies of important reforms facilitated by policy experiments at different junctures of China's HE development: early 1980s, mid-late 1980s, late 1990s, and early 2010s. Within each reform, two elite universities as 'experiment points' (shi dian) were selected. Through cross-case analysis informed by semi-structured interviews and extensive documentary analysis, the study offers a holistic historical perspective on how PE has been used to bring about institutional changes in China's higher education. The study documents different rationales used for implementing policy experiments. State actors use PE to exert pressure on universities to introduce reforms, to lower associated risks and to strengthen the nation's overall HE policymaking capacity in a volatile and extremely heterogeneous context. For their part, university leaders have adopted PE locally to navigate China's politically charged policymaking environment and to negotiate with state actors more favourable terms for reforms. Therefore, the PE approach enables state-university interactions and power negotiations that create and maintain 'strategy space' for consensus-building and institutional changes. It is an iterative process characterised by central-local interaction and intentionally ambiguous boundaries. The state, however, retains ultimate authority for legitimatising, selecting and expanding policy experiments. It is best understood as elite-enabled experimentation within existing political hierarchies. Over time, China's PE approach has become a semi-institutionalised mechanism for HE reforms. In the various policy experiments discussed in this study, PE functions as a productive, disciplinary and symbolic force at different stages of the policy process. Sometimes it appears to offer a genuinely productive mechanism for producing, identifying and negotiating innovative policy options that may be replicated at a larger scale; sometimes its essential use lies in its generated regulative effect; and sometimes it assumes more of a symbolic role allowing the government to acquire or consolidate reform legitimacy. Policy processes are mediated by these different uses of PE towards either reform efficacy or institutional conformity. This study situates these reforms within broader political, social, economic and historical contexts, and highlights the policy implications for higher education reform internationally.

Made available in DSpace on 2016-06-02T19:35:40Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 1 2999.pdf: 1589377 bytes, checksum: d88f81d4410f11d32592ce45c61823d3 (MD5) Previous issue date: 2010-02-23 / Financiadora de Estudos e Projetos / This paper discusses the implantation of the Curriculum Guidelines for the Education of Ethnic-racial Relations and for Teaching of History and Afro-Brazilian and African Culture (DCN ERER) in a Pedagogy course. It is considered the interference of the institutional and the cultural organization, as well as the characteristics of the Brazilian post-1995 bringing into account the appropriation of the DCN in question by the involved actors and their reflection in the reorganization of the Pedagogy course. We rely on the conception of race as social construct and racism as a category that operates in social relations in Brazil. We tried to identify and analyze educational practices related to education for ethnic-racial relations considering the category called school practice. School practices are investigated in terms of its contribution to the break with the processes of human exploration in the context of capitalist society, especially considering the race-ethnicity category in the inter-relationship with social class. It was found that the culture of the organization, the political context (State Reform) and the individual efforts of teachers and students interfere in the school practice related to the implementation of the studied guidelines. Besides the analysis of the implantation of the DCN of ethnic-racial relations the role of international organizations was taken into account as well as a nongovernmental organization called Educafro. The investigated Pedagogy course is the one from the Universidade São Francisco- Bragança Paulista / SP. After some determined criteria, this site was considered the best locus for the development of fieldwork. / O presente trabalho analisa a implantação das Diretrizes Curriculares para a Educação das Relações Étnico-raciais e para o Ensino de História e Cultura Afro-brasileira e Africana em um curso de Pedagogia. Considera-se a interferência do institucional e da cultura da organização, bem como, as características do Estado brasileiro pós-1995 nas formas de apropriação das DCN em questão pelos atores envolvidos e seu reflexo na reorganização do curso de Pedagogia. Apoiamo-nos na concepção de raça como construto social e de racismo como categoria operante nas relações sociais no Brasil. Buscou-se identificar e analisar práticas educativas relacionadas a educação para as relações étnico-raciais considerando-se a categoria prática escolar. As práticas escolares são analisadas no sentido de sua contribuição para o rompimento com os processos de exploração do humano no contexto da sociedade capitalista, considerando-se especialmente a categoria raça-etnia, na inter-relação com classe social. Pôde-se constatar que a cultura da organização, o contexto político (reforma do Estado) e as iniciativas individuais de professores e de alunos/as interferem na prática escolar relativa a implantação das diretrizes estudadas. Articula-se a análise da implantação das DCN de relações étnico-raciais o papel dos organismos internacionais bem como de uma organização não-governamental denominada Educafro. O curso de Pedagogia investigado é o da Universidade São Francisco Bragança Paulista/SP local que, a partir de determinados critérios demonstrou ser o melhor lócus para o desenvolvimento do trabalho de campo.

The research project, conceptualized through a comparative historical framework, focuses on an analysis of American and English education policy from 1964 to 2000 with particular emphasis on the inter-relationships between education policy and socio-economic disadvantage. Although the focus of the project is primarily the last four decades of the twentieth century, there is an initial consideration of immediate post-war discourses on poverty and education focusing on the impact that these had upon educational structures and curricula. Critical theory, particularly as conceptualized by Jürgen Habermas, and the Culture of Poverty thesis advanced by Oscar Lewis, form the methodological frameworks that underpin the research project. The research, which was conducted in two post-industrial communities with significant rates of socio-economic deprivation and records of poor educational attainment within secondary education, considers the impact of national policy upon the communities, particularly in relationship to socio-economic deprivation, access to education, equality of opportunity and equality of outcomes. The research design utilises the case study method to scrutinise two secondary schools within these communities as a means of analysing how teachers negotiated the implementation of education policies for their respective student populations. Documentary evidence and oral histories provide the methods to delve into this interconnection between education and socio-economic deprivation while modified Skinnerian and Eastonian frameworks provide the foundations upon which to analyse the data. The dissertation is not meant to trace the history of two schools and two communities but to see the schools and communities as a microcosm of American and English secondary education. The intention, therefore, is to employ the research findings to prescribe potential and future policy directions. Essentially, tracing educational history to understand it while utilising educational history as a tool to inform new and innovative policy where education can ameliorate socio-economic deprivation in each nation.

The thesis offers a comparative analysis of language policies in the EU and India. Specifically, it examines the role of power and ideology in the formulation and implementation of language policies. The need for this thesis emerged in view of the lack of comprehensive comparative analyses of language policies which leads to epistemological gaps, including one-dimensional narratives of language policies, and theories which are lacking in precision. In light of these gaps, the thesis undertakes a comprehensive investigation of policies in eight policy domains (administration, legal safeguards for minority languages, law, education, media, healthcare, business, and social welfare) in the EU and India and in two case studies each from the EU (Luxembourg, Wales), and India (Manipur, Tamil Nadu), chosen on the basis of maximum and minimum deviation from the EU's and Indian policies. The study examines policy texts (statutes on language use in these polities), and contexts which concern the historical and socio-political factors underpinning language policies. The thesis makes three important contributions. First, it marks a break from the prevalent understanding of power in macro-level policymaking. Research to date has tended to view power as a monolithic entity, while this thesis offers evidence that power and ideology are not uniform across policy domains. Second, it bridges the text-context divide of language policy research by conducting an investigation of policy-related legislation, and highlighting the importance of texts in understanding language policies, as they reflect the changes in power structures through time. Third, the thesis proposes a new analytical concept for investigating language policies, Categories of Differentiation (COD). Categories of Differentiation refer to the sets of binaries which underpin language policies in the aforementioned case studies. These binaries include the hills-valley divide (Manipur), the Dravidian-Aryan divide (Tamil Nadu), and the autochthonous-allochthonous divide (EU) among others. Language policies have often been described as 'multilayered', and COD offer a systematic approach to exploring these multiple layers. Overall, the thesis demonstrates how comparative research aids understanding of language policies, and sets out a possible theoretical framework for conducting it.

Regardless of culture, socio-economic background, and quality of life, all students deserve the highest quality of education. But the reality is, many education systems around the world do not offer it. Investing in structural reforms in education has the potential to boost economic growth in countries around the world. By learning from different education systems strengths and weaknesses, policy decisions can be made that ensure students are given the opportunity for higher educational outcomes. This study analyzes high, middle, and low quality education systems around the world and the infrastructures that lead to educational success or failure. Fifteen education systems are chosen for this study which includes Shanghai-China, Singapore, Japan, Finland, Canada, Portugal, United States, Luxembourg, Spain, Hungry, Brazil, Argentina, Indonesia, Qatar, and Peru. Each system is analyzed in terms of its teacher quality, curriculum, school system structure, and educational equity. From this study, it appears that there is a high-correlation between four indicators and top- educational success. These four indicators include having a highly selective model for hiring teachers, recruiting teachers from a top-pool of graduates, having a high-level of prestige held for teachers in society, and insuring students of low socio-economic status are given equal educational opportunities for success. Recommendations for a new teacher training and selection model are discussed based on the top four indicators. These recommendations could cause educational gains for both the United States and other systems around the world.