No full-text available
To read the full-text of this research,
you can request a copy directly from the author.
Capital, Politics and Pedagogy: The Case of Education Inside the United Nations
ResearchGate has not been able to resolve any citations for this publication.
This article discusses peace education in terms of its content and communication form in relation to its context. Content and form involve major choices which are decisive in defining the substance of any education practice, including education for peace, and the implicit or explicit choices made are related to the differing conceptions of peace education.
Elites and their formation have become of increasing public concern and research interest in recent years. The lessons from such research can be made more generalizable if a measure of elite formation could be developed that is comparable across countries. But, the nature of elite formation renders this a complex task. Nevertheless, in this paper, by building upon measures employed in other fields, such as industrial economics, we construct indices that facilitate the comparison of elite formation across countries. We illustrate this through a comparison of the schooling of Irish and British cabinet ministers.
It has been argued that positivist and constructivist ontologies are irreconcilable. According to LINCOLN and GUBA (2000), positivism's "naive realism" holds that reality is both "real" and "apprehendable," whereas constructivism maintains that meaning is generated by individuals and groups. This analysis implies that the quantitative and qualitative methodologies associated with positivism and constructivism, respectively, are also incommensurable. In this paper, constructivist realism is proposed as an alternative ontology that accommodates positivism and constructivism and the methods that they subtend. The first step is to acknowledge a social world (or worlds) that is reflected in the natural attitude of daily life and exists prior to and independent of either positivist or constructivist analysis; hence realism. Phenomena are understood as processes which cut across the physical, social, and personal (self) worlds. Qualitative and quantitative researchers examine these phenomena, offering rich descriptive accounts or precise analyses of functional relations, respectively. It is assumed that both approaches to research practice face the problem of constructing "data" and are therefore subject to potential bias. While description has traditionally been viewed as preceding hypothesis testing (i.e., natural history precedes hypothesis testing), the two approaches are viewed here as complementary and in parallel. Qualitative methods offer an in-depth account of underlying processes and can help frame hypotheses that test specific functional relationships, while empirical findings related to processes can suggest areas which might benefit from detailed descriptive examination.
URN: urn:nbn:de:0114-fqs010177
Elites and their formation have become a matter of increasing public concern and research interest in recent years. The lessons from such research can be made more generalisable if a measure of elite formation could be developed that is comparable across different elite formation systems, whether they differ by elite, time or country. But, the nature of elite formation renders this a complex task. Nevertheless, in this article, by building upon measures employed in other fields such as industrial economics, indices are constructed that facilitate the comparison of elite formation systems. This is illustrated through a comparison of the schooling of Irish and British cabinet ministers.
What is the meaning of peace, why should we study it, and how should we achieve it? Although there are an increasing number of manuscripts, curricula and initiatives that grapple with some strand of peace education, there is, nonetheless, a dearth of critical, cross-disciplinary, international projects/books that examine peace education in conjunction with war and conflict. Within this volume, the authors contend that war/military conflict/violence are not a nebulous, far-away, mysterious venture; rather, they argue that we are all, collectively, involved in perpetrating and perpetuating militarization/conflict/violence inside and outside of our own social circles. Therefore, education about and against war can be as liberating as it is necessary. If war equates killing, can our schools avoid engaging in the examination of what war is all about? If education is not about peace, then is it about war? Can a society have education that willfully avoids considering peace as its central objective? Can a democracy exist if pivotal notions of war and peace are not understood, practiced, advocated and ensconced in public debate? These questions, according to Carr and Porfilio and the contributors they have assembled, merit a critical and extensive reflection. This book seeks to provide a range of epistemological, policy, pedagogical, curriculum and institutional analyses aimed at facilitating meaningful engagement toward a more robust and critical examination of the role that schools play (and can play) in framing war, militarization and armed conflict and, significantly, the connection to peace.
REVIEWS
"The doomsday clock moves closer to midnight in a world that has gone mad with violence and perpetual war. The power of the military to manufacture and sanitize death, devastation and destruction has never been interrogated before by critical educators. Educating for Peace in a Time of Permanent War: Are Schools Part of the Solution or the Problem? is the first volume of its kind in which the militarization of education (both in curriculum and in the larger pedagogical order) is examined. This is an extremely important book that should be read by all educators."
- Karen Anijar, Professor Emeritus, Arizona State University
"In Educating for Peace in a Time of Permanent War" Are Schools Part of the Solution or the Problem?, editors Paul R. Carr and Brad J. Porfilio skillfully weave together and present the intellectual capital (the theory, philosophy and empirical work) of a set of international scholars par excellence. In five engaging sections – 'Theorizing Peace, War and Peace'; 'Scanning the War in Our Daily (and Educational) Lives'; 'The Curriculum of War and Peace'; 'Internationalizing Peace and the Trauma of War and Conflict'; and, 'Resisting the Militarization of Education' – and contextualized between the inspiring bookends of a Foreword by Antonia Darder and an Afterword by Zvi Bekerman, the authors explore virtually every aspect of the role of education in the drive for war and its perpetuation, and its equally liberatory potential in perusing its antithesis, peace. Any activist, student or academic working in the areas of peace, education, sociology, social justice or anti-imperialism – or anyone excited about the current world-wide push-back against the forces of oppression (neo-liberalism, authoritarianism, sexism, racism and homophobia) – would be remiss not to carefully read and consider the important thoughts and analyses proffered in this strikingly important volume!"
- Marc Pruyn, Senior Lecturer, Monash University
"In our shadowed time of military solutions to chronic problems, schools themselves mirror these means toward an end. The authors in this volume critically assess the role of schooling as a tool of governments and nation-building through analysis of the military mind and militarism in our teaching and learning. They find in the efficiency and surveillance of a modern nation-state a cast of mind and a portfolio of practices that seep inexorably down to authoritarian accountability measures in many schools today. I was particularly struck to realize that common means of peace education may be too weak or incomplete to counter the military mind and its accepted solutions to conflict, especially when the war machine becomes a major means to economic prosperity. The part of this volume devoted to classroom practices by critical peace educators around the world gave me some hope that teaching and learning in and out of schools may someday become generative, rather than reactive, incubators for a new life. This new life would be a way of being in the world that is not simply an altered cast of mind or an amended outlook. It would be a culture of peace-building that would begin to counter the suspicion of our relationships with one another, the violence of modes of being with non-human animals, and the exploitation of our planet."
- A. G. Rud, Dean and Professor, Washington State University
Each year the Asia-Pacific centre of education for international understanding (APCEIU), operating under the auspices of UNESCO, hosts a peace education training-of-trainer’s program for teacher-educators from Asia-Pacific member states. In this paper, I examine through a qualitative case study approach the programmatic design and evaluation of the APCEIU training program, seeking to monitor its medium-term impact on educators in order to understand the broader implications of peace education training. Research findings are based on consultation records, documentary analysis, observations, and questionnaire responses from participants of the 2009 peace education training program. In the medium-term impact assessment report, 14 educators offered data pertaining to their post-program implementation of peace education concepts and practices into their work. Data was also collected from several participants two years later to continue monitoring progress. These results are further compared to impact data gathered from eight graduates of the University for Peace. Findings indicate that among the 23 educators who participated in the study all have gone on to develop peace education programs or policies in their home countries.
In this article, we sort through various fundamental premises about peace education to figure out how those premises operate to normalize particular meanings for peace, conflict, education, and other related concepts. We argue that peace education may often become part of the problem it tries to solve, if theoretical work is not used to interrogate the taken for granted assumptions about peace and peace education. For this purpose, we make explicit our own proposition of critical peace education through explicating the openings that are created by putting forward some alternative premises about peace, educational reform, and schooling. In particular, we put forward a proposition consisting of four elements aiming to reclaim criticality in peace education: reinstating the materiality of things and practices; reontologizing research and practice in peace education; becoming critical experts of design; and engaging in critical cultural analysis.
The use of numerical/quantitative data in qualitative research studies and reports has been controversial. Prominent qualitative researchers such as Howard Becker and Martyn Hammersley have supported the inclusion of what Becker called “quasi-statistics”: simple counts of things to make statements such as “some,” “usually,” and “most” more precise. However, others have resisted such uses, particularly when they are requested by reviewers for journals. This paper presents both the advantages of integrating quantitative information in qualitative data collection, analysis, and reporting, and the potential problems created by such uses and how these can be dealt with. It also addresses the definition of mixed methods research, arguing that the use of numbers by itself doesn't make a study “mixed methods.”
Peace education initiatives have been subject to heated public debate and so far the complexities involved have not been fully understood. This multilayered analysis examines how teachers negotiate ideological, pedagogical and emotional challenges in their attempts to enact a peace education policy. Focusing primarily on the case study of conflict-affected Cyprus, Michalinos Zembylas, Constadina Charalambous and Panayiota Charalambous situate the Cypriot case within wider theoretical and methodological debates in the field and explore the implications of their findings for theory and practice. Building on current anthropological approaches, the authors use insights from policy studies and sociolinguistics to examine peace education agendas and the ways these are shaped by the dynamics of local politics and classroom practices. This study will be valuable reading for researchers of peace and policy studies as well as for practitioners and policy makers involved in introducing peace education initiatives that challenge teachers’long-held beliefs. © Michalinos Zembylas, Constadina Charalambous and Panayiota Charalambous 2016.
This article is adapted from a paper originally presented in June 1997 in Seattle at the 88th Annual Conference of the Special Libraries Association. A definitive explanation of what comprises an education library is followed by a description of methods used in seeking out such libraries on an international basis. By pursuing a specific research path, the mission, purpose, and goals, and history of each selected education library is surveyed, and the size, clientele, type of collection, services, publications, and databases are given a comprehensive examination.
Peace and conflict studies (PACS) education has grown significantly in the last 30 years, mainly in Higher Education. This article critically analyzes the ways in which this field might be subject to poststructural critique, and posits Bourdieusian second-order reflexivity as a means of responding to these critiques. We propose here that theory-building within PACS education is often limited by the dominance of Galtung and Freire, and that, while the foundational ideas of positive and negative peace, structural and cultural violence, conscientization, reflexivity and critical pedagogy are still relevant today, they nevertheless need to be combined in new ways with each other, and with Bourdieu’s notions of habitus and field, to adequately respond to poststructural critique. Thus, we call here for greater field-based reflexivity in twenty-first century PACS.
This paper examines the role of UN peace academics in teaching for peace within the UN higher education system, and questions what contribution, if any, UN peacebuilding education makes to the broader field of PACS education, and in the lives of the people it touches. The study draws on ethnographic data collected over a six-month period at one UN university in 2015. The data collection period involved participant observation, interviews with faculty and postgraduate students, document analysis, and surveys with learners. Findings suggest tensions and contradiction in the university around issues of UN mimicry, Western-centrism, state domination, and institutional capitalism. Implications are briefly addressed and recommendations provided.
This article examines higher education for peace inside the United Nations (UN). It offers an overview and synthesis of core concepts, organizing frameworks and theoretical premises in the field of peace and conflict studies (PACS) higher education and in the UN universities in particular, as the field aspires toward transformative learning and social justice. The article then critically analyzes the ways in which the field might perpetuate structural and cultural violence and offers implications for the UN universities. In these critiques, I call for further inquiry into the taken-for-granted assumptions of the field and suggest greater criticality along with enhanced empathy and hope for PACS education in the 21st century.
I spent 1966–1967 doing first-hand research on the UN system, at UN Headquarters in Geneva, Switzerland. While there I made personal contact with European scholars who informed me about the International Peace Research Association (IPRA). It then had its headquarters in the Netherlands. In the summer of 1967 I attended an IPRA conference held in Sweden and listened to presentations from peace research scholars from around the world. Here I learned that people tend to define peace as a condition that exists when they overcome the most significant conditions that prevent them from having a normal human life. Thus, people around the world attempting to develop peace have different agendas. This means that achieving world peace requires cooperation among peoples having different peace agendas. This experience stimulated me to add peace research to my agenda, because it had a significant impact on my earlier research on the UN system and on the world relations of local communities.
Acknowledging the dual notions of danger and opportunity that present themselves in contemporary social and ecological crises, this book explores how both peace and environmental education can transform the way we think and what we value. The book outlines the link between social violence and ecological degradation and the need to educate for the purpose of achieving social and ecological peace. Specialists in peace and environmental education offer a holistic and integrated approach on educating about these problems and challenges. They also provide educational strategies, such as curricular frameworks and pedagogical innovations appropriate for both formal and informal settings, and case studies and examples that illustrate their application.
This book poses the question, "How do we transcend the cycles of violence that bewitch our human community while still living in them?" Peacebuilding, in the view of this book, is both a learned skill and an art. Finding this art, this book says, requires a worldview shift. Conflict professionals must envision their work as a creative act - an exercise of what the book terms the "moral imagination." This imagination must, however, emerge from and speak to the hard realities of human affairs. The peacebuilder must have one foot in what is and one foot beyond what exists. The book is organized around four guiding stories that point to the moral imagination but are incomplete. The book seeks to understand what happened in these individual cases and how they are relevant to large-scale change. The purpose is not to propose a grand new theory; instead it wishes to stay close to the "messiness" of real processes and change, and to recognize the serendipitous nature of the discoveries and insights that emerge along the way. Like most professional peacemakers, the author of this book sees his work as a religious vocation.
Asking fundamental and often uncomfortable questions about the nature and purposes of formal education, this book explores the three main ways of looking at the relationship between formal education, individuals and society: that education improves society. that education reproduces society exactly as it is. that education makes society worse and harms individuals. Whilst educational policy documents and much academic writing and research stresses the first function and occasionally make reference to the second, the third is largely played down or ignored. In this unique and thought-provoking book, Clive Harber argues that while schooling can play a positive role, violence towards children originating in the schools system itself is common, systematic and widespread internationally and that schools play a significant role in encouraging violence in wider society. Topics covered include physical punishment, learning to hate others, sexual abuse, stress and anxiety, and the militarization of school. The book both provides detailed evidence of such forms of violence and sets out an analysis of schooling that explains why they occur. In contrast, the final chapter explores existing alternative forms of education which are aimed at the development of democracy and peace. This book should be read by anyone involved in education - from students and academics to policy-makers and practitioners around the world.
"The authors have cajoled, intrigued, or reassured their 73 'voices' into telling a fascinating story of the UN and its institutions, which is also a story of 73 individual lives, of women and men... with their own complicated histories of emigration and education, family relationships and professional choices, hopes and successes." -- from the Foreword by Emma Rothschild. "Far from being a distant bureaucracy, the UN is composed of individuals who are reshaped by vital experiences. UN Voices gives international civil servants human faces and shows how ideas drive the grand experiment. It is a fascinating book." -- Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. UN Voices presents the human and moving stories of an extraordinary group of individuals who contributed to the economic and social record of the UN's life and activities. Drawing from extensive interviews, the book presents in their own words the experiences of 73 individuals from around the globe who have spent much of their professional lives engaged in United Nations affairs. We hear from secretaries-general and presidents, ministers and professors, social workers and field workers, as well as diplomats and executive heads of UN agencies. Among those interviewed are noted figures such as Kofi Annan, Boutros Boutros-Ghali, Alister McIntyre, Conor Cruise O'Brien, Javier Pérez de Cuéllar, and Kurt Waldheim, as well as many less well known UN professional men and women who have made significant contributions to the international struggle for a better world. Their personal accounts also engage their contributions in dealing with such events and issues as the UN's founding, decolonization, the rise and fall of the Berlin Wall, human rights, the environment, and September 11, 2001. © 2005 by United Nations Intellectual History Project. All rights reserved.
This article focuses on the concepts of peace, education and research, and the ways in which they combine to form the field of peace education and peace education research. It discusses the ways in which each can be said to be facing a crisis of legitimation, representation and praxis, and the structural and cultural violence that inhibit efforts towards a more inclusive global conception of peace. It will review some ways in which it may be possible to rise to Gur-Ze’ev’s challenge to respond to post-structural critiques of the field. Drawing on participatory, auto ethnographic and arts-based research methodologies, it suggests ways of creating synergies between research and aspirations towards positive (rather than negative) peace.
Rethinking Citizenship Education presents a fundamental reassessment of the field. Drawing on empirical research, the book argues that attempting to transmit preconceived notions of citizenship through schools is both unviable and undesirable. The notion of 'curricular transposition' is introduced, a framework for understanding the changes undergone in the passage between the ideals of citizenship, the curricular programmes designed to achieve them, their implementation in practice and the effects on students. The 'leaps' between these different stages make the project of forming students in a mould of predefined citizenship highly problematic. Case studies are presented of contrasting initiatives in Brazil, a country with high levels of political marginalisation, but also significant experiences of participatory democracy. These studies indicate that effective citizenship education depends on a harmonisation or 'seamless enactment' of the stages outlined above. In contrast, provision in countries such as the UK and USA is characterised by disjunctures, showing insufficient involvement of teachers in programme design, and a lack of space for the construction of students' own political understandings. Some more promising directions for citizenship education are proposed, therefore, ones which acknowledge the significance of pedagogical relations and school democratisation, and allow students to develop as political agents in their own right.
* Prologue: Seeking the Prep School Perspective The World Of Boarding Schools * Privilege and the Importance of Elite Education * Rousseaus Children: Total Educational Environments * The Chosen Ones The Prep Rite Of Passage * Cultural Capital: Curricula and Teachers * Academic Climates, Teaching Styles, and Student Stress * The Iron Hand in the Velvet Glove: Trustees, Heads, and Charisma * The Prep Crucible * The Student Underlife and the Loss of Innocence The World Beyond * The Vital Link: Prep Schools and Higher Education * Preps at Play and in the Power Structure
Since the end of the Cold War, conflict prevention and resolution, peacekeeping and peacebuilding have risen to the top of the international agenda. The third edition of this hugely popular text explains the key concepts, charts the development of the field, evaluates successes and failures, and assesses the main current challenges and debates in the second decade of the twenty-first century. Existing material has been thoroughly updated and four new chapters added, on environmental conflict resolution, conflict resolution in the arts and popular culture, conflict resolution in the media and the communications revolution, and theories and critiques of the field. The authors argue that a new form of cosmopolitan conflict resolution is emerging, which offers a hopeful means for human societies to handle their conflicts non-violently and eventually to transcend and celebrate their differences.
Selecting, gaining access to and attending college (or university) in the United States involve markers of legitimacy and prestige as understood through symbolic capital. An entire complex of fine differentiations operate to distinguish such capital in both students and the institutions they attend. Drawing on works of Bourdieu, this article describes the ways that these distinctions were made about symbolic capital and how legitimacy was constructed as observed during nearly one year of ethnographic research in the Office of Admission of a small, private, urban, four-year college. This article offers three separate moments from the larger ethnographic project to highlight (1) embodied markers of symbolic capital for individuals in this field, (2) similar such markers for institutions, and (3) the contested nature and fluidity of legitimacy in practice.
PART ONE: CONCEPTUAL ISSUES IN THE USE OF QUALITATIVE METHODS The Nature of Qualitative Inquiry Strategic Themes in Qualitative Methods Variety in Qualitative Inquiry Theoretical Orientations Particularly Appropriate Qualitative Applications PART TWO: QUALITATIVE DESIGNS AND DATA COLLECTION Designing Qualitative Studies Fieldwork Strategies and Observation Methods Qualitative Interviewing PART THREE: ANALYSIS, INTERPRETATION, AND REPORTING Qualitative Analysis and Interpretation Enhancing the Quality and Credibility of Qualitative Analysis
This article seeks to unpack the implications of technocracy for contemporary peace-building. It aims to illustrate how the bureaucratic imperative explains much about the ascendancy of certain actors to positions of prominence on the peace-building landscape, and the types of activities that these actors engage in. In line with world polity theory, it is interested in the construction and institutionalization of discourses, understandings, expectations and practices of peace-building. It argues that there has been a 'technocratic turn' in relation to peace-building, whereby there has been a gradual but persistent trend towards the application of technocracy in the framing of conflict and approaches to it. Two key claims advanced on behalf of technocracy - neutrality and efficiency - are discussed. The article then argues that a complex mix of structural and proximate factors have reinforced the technocratic turn in peace-building. It concludes by considering the extent to which the discursive framing of conflict by key actors predetermines their conflict response. The article is primarily an exercise in conceptual scoping, though it can also be read as a contribution to the critique of the liberal peace and considerations of resistance and agency in peace-building contexts.
This paper explores ‘pedagogies of resistance’ - or critical and democratic educational models utilized by social movements - and how global examples of engaged educational praxis may inform peace education. The central inquiry of this article is ‘How can educational projects that resist larger social, political and economic inequalities offer understandings about how we learn, teach, and act for peace in diverse settings?’ Drawing upon literature from various fields, ideas and insights are offered about how the field of peace education can better respond to multiple and diverse realities, particularly those facing marginalized communities. The article provides an overview of key tenets of peace education and ideas central to ‘critical peace education;’ offers a framing of ‘pedagogies of resistance;’ and, lastly, details what directions emerge by putting these two educational forms in conversation.
:
When Danny Kaye became goodwill ambassador for the UN Children’s Fund (UNICEF) in 1954, a process was set in motion that brought media industries, stars, and the United Nations into dynamic relationship and birthed a new concept of celebrity diplomacy. This essay historicizes the rise of contemporary celebrity diplomats like Bono and Angelina Jolie by theorizing how the stardom of Kaye came to function as sentimental education, that is, as a tool for teaching Western audiences about their emotional bonds and moral obligations to distant populations. In turn, through Kaye’s performances as “Mr. UNICEF,” stardom emerged as a potent cultural technology of citizen shaping for global governing.
Education holds a particular place for theorisations of development formulated since the 1950s. In changing conditions, marked initially by the political economy of the Cold War and decolonisation, and later by globalisation and the political realignments of the post-Cold War era, views on the aims for education, how to systematise school knowledge, organise pedagogy or view school management have been much contested. Particular development theories' assumptions, research methodologies and practices have emphasised certain aspects of education and de-emphasised others. But little attention has been given to views of justice (both implicit and explicit) and how these orient the dynamics of thinking about education and international development.
Six approaches to development theory are explored in this chapter in relation to the ways in which they conceptualise education and social justice. This is a partial selection as it is not possible to explore all the varieties and debates in development theory in one chapter. I have made the selection, partly because these approaches are evident in largely chronological waves from the 1950s and partly because they are those commonly discussed in general reviews of phases of contemporary development theory (Preston, 1996; Munck & O'Hearn, 1999; Rapley, 2002; Gasper, 2004). In discussing them I have tried to draw out how each locates the aims of education and the implications of these for practices advocated in relation to curriculum, pedagogy and management. I also attempt to distil in each approach assumptions about the nature of the person to be educated and the connection between education and social justice. I draw out some of the consequences of these formulations for the preferred forms of research associated with each theory. The consequences of the explanations these offer for global action on education and poverty is then assessed.
The ‘new materialism’ is the most common name given to a series of movements in several fields that criticise anthropocentrism, rethink subjectivity by playing up the role of inhuman forces within the human, emphasize the self-organizing powers of several nonhuman processes, explore dissonant relations between those processes and cultural practice, rethink the sources of ethics, and commend the need to fold a planetary dimension more actively and regularly into studies of global, interstate and state politics. After reviewing several key tenets of this diverse movement in philosophy, biology and the human sciences, we focus on how it casts light on the dissonant relations between the drives of neoliberal capitalism and boomerang effects from nonhuman forces. Exploration of such relations both dramatises the fragility of things today and helps to explain why many constituencies refuse to acknowledge and address it. After presenting a few capital–force-field conjunctions that illustrate the fragility of things, this article briefly explores some intercoded counter-strategies to address the contemporary predicament.
The paper sets out a theoretical approach for understanding the quality of education in low income countries from a social justice perspective. The paper outlines and critiques the two dominant approaches that currently frame the debate about education quality, namely, the human capital and human rights approaches. Drawing principally on the ideas of Nancy Fraser and Amyarta Sen the paper then sets out an alternative approach based on a theory of social justice and of capabilities. The paper develops an overall understanding of how education quality can be understood in relation to the extent to which it fosters key capabilities that individuals, communities and society in general have reason to value. It then analyses three inter-related dimensions of the quality of education from a social justice perspective. Each dimension is considered in relation to contemporary policy debates and research including the work of EdQual. The first dimension, that of inclusion draws attention to the access of different groups of learners to quality inputs that facilitate the development of their capabilities, the cultural and institutional barriers that impact on the learning of different groups and priorities for overcoming these. The second dimension, that of relevance, is concerned with the extent to which the outcomes of education are meaningful for all learners, valued by their communities and consistent with national development priorities in a changing global context, whilst the third dimension, that of democracy considers how decisions about education quality are governed and the nature of participation in debates at the local, national and global levels. It is argued that a social justice framework can provide an alternative rationale for a policy emphasis on quality that encompasses but goes beyond that provided by human capital and rights approaches; that through emphasising the importance of context and through providing a normative basis for thinking about quality in relation to development, it provides a useful starting point for re-conceptualising education quality and how it can be evaluated; and, that it draws attention to the central importance of public dialogue and debate at the local, national and global levels about the nature of a quality education and quality frameworks at these levels.