By Jaya Carrier
I hope everyone has had a great week so far! This week, I was interested in a paper published by the University of Cambridge about the nature of educational research discourse on social and traditional media in the UK and Australia. This was published by Globalisation, Societies and Education in February 2021. Objectives: To understand the nature of the debates in educational research in the UK and Australia and how this shapes educational policy. Summary: The key findings were:
- Education debates in the UK and Australia show evidence of ‘micropopulism’. This is not quite populism in the sense of Brexit or Trumpism, but has salient features of populism insofar as it is deeply divisive, and looks to pit the ‘underserved’ against the ‘elite’.
- In particular, it looks to position those with more traditional views on education against more progressive ones, wherein traditional educators may claim that they are forced by more progressive educators to adopt student-centred teaching methods that have very little basis in educational research.
- The paper suggests that this kind of polarisation does not reflect the true reality of classrooms, which is usually a purposeful mixture of the two.
- These debates, in turn, are influenced by broader so-called ‘culture wars’ on social media and appear to be able to influence policy.
- The authors argue that educators need to be aware of how their own participation in such debates may inadvertently support ‘micropopulist’ tactics that influence policy.
- How do I interact with this debate on traditional or social media? What do I think about this?
- How does my teaching fit within this debate? What do I think about this?
"The paper suggests that this kind of polarisation does not reflect the true reality of classrooms, which is usually a purposeful mixture of the two". Exactly! The ToK teachers out there could use this as a great example of a false dichotomy, which is typical of social media-fuelled "debate".
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