Doing Comparative Case Studies: New Designs and Directions 9781032106847, 9781032106885, 9781003216551

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“Building on their groundbreaking and innovative comparative case study approach developed over the past two decades, Frances Vavrus and Lesley Bartlett offer another excellent contribution for education and social science researchers. This volume weaves together 11 insightful chapters based on research from around the globe—each followed by thought-provoking discussion questions—that illuminate the key methodological decisions made by the author and the broader methodological insights for scholars seeking to design their own studies.” Dr. Monisha Bajaj, Professor of International & Multicultural Education, University of San Francisco, USA “In times like these when uncertainty is the new normal and social systems are becoming more complex and dynamic, the comparative case study (CCS) approach is an innovative framework for the study of education. Lesley Bartlett and Frances Vavrus have assembled 11 chapters that demonstrate the utility of the CCS approach and extend its implications across the three – now famous – axes: vertical, horizontal, and transversal. Education researchers and social scientists more broadly will find this collection inspiring and useful.” Dr. Oren Pizmony-Levy, Associate Professor and Program Director, International and Comparative Education Program, Department of International and Transcultural Studies, Teachers College, Columbia University, USA

Doing Comparative Case Studies

Doing Comparative Case Studies: New Designs and Directions extends the comparative case study methodology established by Bartlett and Vavrus and employed in many areas of social research, especially in education. This volume unites a diverse, international group of education scholars whose work exemplifies the affordances and constraints of the comparative case study (CCS) approach and offers new theoretical and empirical directions for researchers. In 11 engaging chapters, experts in comparative education, early childhood education, peace education, refugee education, special education, and teacher education discuss their use of the CCS approach to produce new ways of knowing and to address challenges of multi-scalar and multi-sited research. The first section, Conceptualizing Cases and Case Selection, emphasizes the importance of carefully selecting cases during different phases of research while continuously reflecting on how these choices influence the findings. The second section, Balancing Specificity and Generalizability, addresses the challenge of balancing the need for rich, deep data while including multiple sites. The third section, Enabling Processual Analysis across Sites and Scales, demonstrates the fit between the CCS approach and qualitative research that unfolds over time and space. The fourth section, Addressing the Transversal Axis, showcases research with a strong temporal dimension. The fifth and final section, New Directions, suggests inspiring and innovative methods. Offering rich methodological examples and provocative discussion questions, this volume will appeal to undergraduate and graduate students in education and research design courses, and to scholars and policymakers in diverse fields seeking to design studies of complex phenomena at different sites and scales. Frances Vavrus is Professor and Associate Chair of the Department of Organizational Leadership, Policy, and Development at the University of Minnesota. Lesley Bartlett is Professor and Chair of the Department of Educational Policy Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

Doing Comparative Case Studies New Designs and Directions

Edited by Frances Vavrus and Lesley Bartlett

Cover image: © Getty Images First published 2023 by Routledge 4 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN and by Routledge 605 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10158 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2023 selection and editorial matter, Frances Vavrus and Lesley Bartlett; individual chapters, the contributors. The right of Frances Vavrus and Lesley Bartlett to be identified as the authors of the editorial material, and of the authors for their individual chapters, has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A catalog record has been requested for this book ISBN: 978-1-032-10684-7 (hbk) ISBN: 978-1-032-10688-5 (pbk) ISBN: 978-1-003-21655-1 (ebk) DOI: 10.4324/9781003216551 Typeset in Goudy by Taylor & Francis Books

To our students with whom we have had the pleasure of learning as they carried out their own comparative case studies, and to scholars everywhere who seek to “follow the inquiry” at the heart of this approach.

Contents

List of Figures List of Tables Acknowledgements Introduction: Case Studies with a Comparative Sensibility

xi xii xiii 1

FRANCES VAVRUS AND LESLEY BARTLETT

SECTION I

Conceptualizing Cases and Case Selection 1 Making Discipline Reform: A Comparative Case Study of School Policymaking

17 19

ABIGAIL J. BENEKE

2 Meeting the Needs of Refugee Learners: A Comparative Case Study of Lebanese and Syrian Teachers’ Approaches to Educating Refugee Students in Lebanon

36

ELIZABETH F. ADELMAN

SECTION II

Balancing Specificity and Generalizability 3 Language Policy and Early Grade Instruction in Nigeria: A Comparative Case Study of Policy Awareness and Implementation

53

55

OLAYINKA OLAGBEGI-ADEGBITE

4 The Promise of the Comparative Case Study Approach in Understanding Educational Program Design and Change: Peace Studies Programs in Kenyan Universities MAURICE SIKENYI

71

x

Contents

SECTION III

Enabling Processual Analysis across Sites and Scales 5 Comparison as Analysis, Interview Technique, and Relational Ethic: Findings and Reflections from a Study on the International Baccalaureate in Ecuador

87

89

TIAGO BITTENCOURT

6 Special Education Policy and Practice Across Scales: Providing a Free Appropriate Public Education During a Pandemic

106

HELEN ROSE MIESNER

SECTION IV

Addressing the Transversal Axis 7 Beyond Permanence and Change: Tracing the Transversal Axis of Community Development

123 125

ELENA TOUKAN

8 The Evolving Discourses of Suzhi and Suzhi Education: A CCS Approach to the Study of Rural and Migrant Children in China

141

JINGJING LOU

SECTION V

New Directions 9 Ensuring Quality in Pre-Primary Education: A Comparative Case Study of Tanzanian Stakeholder Perspectives

159 161

BETHANY WILINSKI

10 Visualizing Research: Reflections from a Comparative Case Study of English Language Teacher Professionalism in Rwanda

178

LEANNE M. CAMERON

11 Negotiating the Purposes of Early Childhood Education and Care

197

ALEX KLAPPERICH

Notes on Contributors

214

Index

218

Figures

1.1 1.2 1.3 9.1 10.1

The 5R Process The ARROW Framework The C-Grove Framework Data Generation Overview Detail of Full Network Mapping Based on Relationships and Networks of Association Members. 10.2 Detail from Data Mapping to Determine More Influential Spaces for Discourse Dissemination

26 28 30 167 185 186

Tables

6.1 9.1 11.1 11.2

Data Collection Policymakers and University Researchers Examples of Nominalization Examples of Collocation

111 167 202 203

Acknowledgements

We wish to thank the scholars who participated in the Comparative Case Studies: New Designs, New Directions panels at the 2021 Comparative and International Education Society conference, especially those whose engaging work appears in the pages to follow. They have enriched the comparative case study approach in multiple ways. We also wish to thank Sheetal Digari for her editorial assistance and Hannah Shakespeare, Senior Editor for Research Methods at Routledge, for her unwavering support of this volume.

Introduction Case Studies with a Comparative Sensibility Frances Vavrus and Lesley Bartlett

The growth of interest in qualitative, comparative research in recent years reflects a number of changes in the ways that social scientists conceptualize the places, people, and institutions that lie at the heart of their inquiry. Global, albeit uneven, flows of ideas, persons, and capital have called into question the notions of bounded research sites and circumscribed variables identified a priori by the scholar, leading to an explosion of multi-sited, multi-scalar research (Appadurai, 1996; Marcus, 1995; Xiang, 2013). At the same time, qualitative researchers remain committed to exploring the myriad ways that people make meaning in situ in the context of enduring social and political economic structures, especially those that affect social movements (Niesz, 2019) and social policy (Levinson et al., 2020). Therein lies the abiding appeal of comparative case study research. The methodological implications of this shift from single- to multi-sited casebased research have been actively debated by anthropologists, sociologists, political scientists, education scholars, and others. For instance, John Gerring (2004) argues that case study scholars often “have difficulty articulating what it is that they are doing, methodologically speaking” (p. 341). Similarly, Charles Ragin (1992) contends that scholars are often vague about whether they are defining cases by variables or constructs, whether cases are constituted empirically or theoretically, and whether cases are “discovered” (i.e., exist “relatively external to the conduct of research”) or whether they are “developed” over the course of an emergent research design (p. 1). Gerring (2004) defines a case study as “an intensive study of a single unit for the purpose of understanding a larger class of (similar) units” (p. 342). However, the mention of “units” begs the question: What constitutes a unit? Who decides, how, and when? How does one determine the “larger class of (similar) units”? How does this notion of units hold up when one compares cases? As Corey Abramson and Neil Gong (2020) explain, responses to such questions vary depending on one’s approach to comparison, which reflects ontological, epistemological, and axiological positions that are often ignored in discussions of design and methods. Comparative case studies are powerful because they typically reflect a rich qualitative tradition that demands the development of thick description; an DOI: 10.4324/9781003216551-1

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accounting of the historical, cultural, social, political, and economic contexts; and serious engagement with how participants understand and frame their own experiences. However, when cases are compared across time and space, they must extract and generalize from these contexts to some degree because they are examining the features of two or more instances of a specific phenomenon. In comparing and contrasting, scholars aim to enhance the explanatory potential of case studies by identifying patterns across cases; in so doing, they confirm, develop, or modify theory. Yet this process often leads readers to expect, or even demand, the implementation of a positivist logic more appropriate for quantitative studies, such as the articulation of a hypothesis or the identification and measurement of variables, with other features of a case “controlled for” or held constant. How, then, do scholars who are committed to comparative, qualitative case studies manage these contradictory expectations and still produce rigorous, innovative research? Doing Comparative Case Studies: New Designs and Directions addresses this important question. The book builds on our previous efforts to establish a vital new approach to social research (Bartlett & Vavrus, 2014, 2017, 2018; Vavrus & Bartlett, 2006, 2009). Our comparative case study (CCS) approach employs a multi-sited, multi-scalar perspective on comparison by tracing the movement and morphing of a phenomenon across time and space along three different but intersecting axes. The horizontal axis compares how similar policies unfold in different, socially produced locations that may appear, on the surface, to be either quite similar (e.g., three preschools) or fundamentally distinct (e.g., a refugee camp and an NGO classroom). The vertical axis attends to similarities and differences in policies and priorities at different socio-spatial scales, such as teacher education policy based on UNESCO guidelines developed by a ministry of education and employed in a rural school district in one country. The transversal axis historically situates the phenomenon by considering how it came to be in the first place owing to the conditions of coloniality, domestic or international political economic pressure, community-based mobilizing, and other processes that unfold over time. This new volume, grounded in our CCS approach, brings together a diverse group of education scholars to address several key questions aimed at those seeking to do comparative, case-based research: What are the benefits and challenges of this approach to case study research? How has the CCS approach been employed in different branches of education? What have scholars in these different areas learned from using the CCS approach? This volume expands the value and utility of this approach through detailed and engaging chapters that exemplify comparative case studies and their affordances, even as they reflect on the difficulties and limitations of conducting such research. Each chapter is followed by discussion questions to prompt the reader to engage with both the empirical and methodological contributions of the chapters. In the remainder of this introductory chapter, we discuss three categories of case study research that informed the development of our CCS approach;

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we describe the three axes of this multi-sited, socio-spatial approach; and we introduce the sections and chapters that constitute the remainder of this volume. Our goal is to illustrate how comparative case studies can be used to explore a wide range of compelling questions, address the challenges in using this approach through new designs, and promote new directions for research in education and other fields.

Categorizing Case Study Research In our previous work, we identified three broad categories of case studies— variance-oriented, interpretivist, and process-oriented—and the affordances and challenges of each one (Bartlett & Vavrus, 2017, see especially Chapter 2 for more details). They reflect specific epistemologies and result in different decisions about the design of a study, the methods employed, the process of analysis, and, often, the kinds of narratives produced by the authors. By way of review, we discuss these three categories of case study research to highlight some of the issues that persist in case study methodological debates.

Variance-Oriented Case Studies Variance-oriented case studies embrace a neo-positivist epistemological stance. They define the cases a priori, as empirical units (e.g., a school or a state). They identify variables and investigate relationships among them. As Joseph Maxwell (2004) explains, a variance-oriented approach is: based on an analysis of the contributions of differences in values of particular variables to differences in other variables. The comparison of conditions or groups in which the presumed causal factor takes different values, while other factors are held constant or statistically controlled, is central to this approach to causation… Thus, variance theory tends to be associated with research that employs experimental or correlational designs, quantitative measurement, and statistical analysis. (pp. 4–5) Variance-oriented case studies pose a question (often about causal relations), develop hypotheses, identify variables, develop and operationalize constructs that can be observed and measured, and analyze the results (often using statistical means (Trochim, 2006). Scholars in this vein adopt a realist approach whereby the putatively value-neutral investigator surveys well-defined, bounded cases selected on the basis of certain criteria for the purpose of generalizing to similar cases. Case selection is an important step in this work. As political scientists Alexander George and Andrew Bennett explain in their highly influential Case Studies and Theory Development in the Social Sciences (2005):

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Frances Vavrus and Lesley Bartlett First, the investigator should clearly identify the universe—that is, the “class” or “subclass” of events—of which a single case or a group of cases to be studied are instances. Thus, the cases in a given study must all be instances…of only one phenomenon… Second, a well-defined research objective and an appropriate research strategy to achieve that objective should guide the selection and analysis of a single case or several cases within the class or subclass of the phenomenon under investigation (pp. 68–69).

The emphasis on isolating the phenomenon of interest and identifying cases that represent that “class” is evident in their description of how researchers should proceed from case selection to data analysis. Variance-oriented case studies abound. For example, within the field of political science, controlled comparisons reflect this stance. A controlled comparison “emphasizes case selection based on either contrasting outcomes despite similar potentially explanatory characteristics or similar outcomes despite contrasting potentially explanatory characteristics” (Simmons & Smith, 2017, p. 126). As with any methodology, there are pros and cons of the variance-oriented approach. While it may enable researchers to make general claims and generate hypotheses about future events, some have questioned the notion of “controlling” for alternate explanations. Dan Slater and Daniel Ziblatt (2013) have defended the “enduring indispensability” of controlled comparisons; in contrast, Erica Simmons and Nicholas Smith (2017) argue that the variance orientation represented by controlled comparisons “can lead researchers to deemphasize context and, in the process, potentially diminish the greatest methodological strength of qualitative research: providing contextualized understandings of political processes” (p. 126). Further, the approach can prevent scholars from seeing similarities or interconnections among cases (see Sikenyi’s chapter for a counter-example). In a recent chapter, sociologist Ching Kwan Lee (2020) reflected on her dissertation study (Lee, 1998), which employed a: logic of variable analysis…controlling for some theoretically relevant and significant variables, namely technology, product, management, ownership type, and the state… I looked for other variables such as labor market organization and gender construction which account for the different outcomes, that is gendered regimes of work. (2020, p. 144) This framing led Lee to compare two factories owned by the same company with strikingly different gendered labor processes and shop-floor cultures: one in Hong Kong and one in Shenzen. While resulting in an astute analysis of what Lee called “localistic despotism” versus “familial hegemony” (p. 143),

Introduction

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she recounts that treating the two cases as separate caused her to miss the connections between them—and, in this case, to overlook the fact that one plant would soon be closed and moved to the other site. The chapter then explains how her approach to comparative case study research evolved over time to incorporate “complexity and contingency” in a “conjunctural approaches to comparison” (p. 145).

Interpretivist Case Studies On the other end of the epistemological spectrum, some case studies embrace an interpretivist stance. Interpretivist case studies heavily emphasize local context; they avoid efforts to abstract, preferring an intense focus on the particular and the complexity of local conditions. They stress the social construction of reality and the importance of examining human meaning-making. As Stake (1995) explains, this work seeks out “emic meanings held by the people within the case” (p. 240). Interpretivist case studies center people; in fact, people may be selected as cases. Scholars in this vein use hermeneutical or dialectical research methods that may include phenomenology, grounded theory, biography, oral history, or other qualitative approaches. There is often less of an emphasis on case selection than in other categories of case studies because little effort is expended to identify the larger phenomenon represented by the case. While there are many strengths to the interpretivist approach, there are also some significant weaknesses. First, some of the methodological literature in this vein adopts the idea that a case study should be bounded. Such a decision is contrary to basic qualitative research design, which emphasizes the need for emergent design (see Becker, 2009). Second, interpretivist approaches tend to resist comparison; they cherish the specifics of the case. Relatedly, some who use this approach undermine the potential of case studies to generate significant insights that generalize or transfer. For example, the influential case study methodologist Robert Stake (1994) prioritizes “understanding of the case rather than generalization beyond” (p. 236). He distinguishes between instrumental and intrinsic cases: the former uses the case, or cases, to gain insight into a phenomenon or theory, but intrinsic cases, Stake explains, are exploratory and make no effort to extend theory or generalize. In other words, this class of case study research abandons the prospect of generalization, which, in our view, radically diminishes its potential significance. Finally, a myopic focus on “the local” can cause scholars to ignore how social structures and processes in other locations and at other scales are impinging upon observable phenomena.

Process-Oriented Case Studies In an effort to build on and simultaneously address some of the limitations of variance-oriented and interpretivist approaches for qualitative, comparative case studies, our CCS approach adopts what Maxwell (2013) calls a process

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orientation. Process approaches “tend to see the world in terms of people, situations, events, and the processes that connect these; explanation is based on an analysis of how some situations and events influence others” (p. 29). Notably, this approach eschews the interpretive refusal to consider causation, but it also avoids the variance-oriented notion of causation. As Maxwell explains, Quantitative researchers tend to be interested in whether and to what extent variance in x causes variance in y. Qualitative researchers, on the other hand, tend to ask how x plays a role in causing y, what the process is that connects x and y. (p. 31) A process orientation, as adopted by the CCS approach, does not bound the cases a priori. Nor does it think of cases as found—as pre-existing and defined by empirical units, such as a state or a hospital. Rather, this approach treats cases as made, or rather as constructed theoretically (Ragin, 1992, p. 8). Cases, as Lee (2020) says, are “constituted by the researcher, who has to make choices about the units of empirical and explanatory analysis, as well as the theoretical agenda that informs both” (p. 139). A constructivist stance forces us to realize that cases do not exist independent of the case study: as Joe Soss (2018) explains, “phenomena in the social world do not exist, inherently and really, as a case of any social (science) kind. They are ambiguous occasions for meaning-making, for researchers as much as for the participants who experience them in everyday life” (p. 23). As an alternative, Soss (2018) proposes dispensing with the notion that cases are things (nouns) out there to be discovered. Instead of studying a predetermined case, he recommends “casing a study,” a phrase he uses to describe how researchers should remain aware of the deliberate construction of the case. This stance informs the CCS approach. Our approach approach to case studies insists on an emergent design, which is the hallmark of good qualitative research. As Becker (2009) notes, qualitative researchers “don’t fully specify methods, theory, or data when they begin their research” (p. 548). Instead, he contends, they begin with ideas about what to do where and with whom. As they learn new things, they revise those methods. They might add or delete sites, methods, or participants. They “investigate new leads” (p. 548). They put the data in conversation with existing theory and adapt accordingly. As Becker insists, “Not fully pre-specifying these ideas and procedures, as well as being ready to change them when their findings require it, are not flaws, but rather two of the great strengths of qualitative research” (p. 548). This approach places data collection “in constant dialog with emergent analysis, conceptualization, and theorization” (Lee, 2020, p. 149). Soss (2018) also encourages flexible design. He frames “casing the study” as an ongoing endeavor:

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casing may be pursued at any point in a study, from the planning stages through fieldwork and into the writing process… Each casing allows the researcher to put the study into dialogue with a different set of empirical phenomena, creating new standpoints for interpretation, new paths for generalization, and new terms for relational, processual, or comparative analysis. (p. 23) Rejecting the notion of a “bounded study,” which persists across much of the case study methodological literature, the CCS approach embraces emergent design, in which the scholar gradually modifies and refines the design over the course of the study in relation to what they are learning. As part of that emergent design, the CCS approach encourages scholars to routinely ask themselves about scope, specificity, and sequencing. From the start, the scholar must decide how much to emphasize each axis of comparison. Which axis is foregrounded, and which is backgrounded, and with what possible consequences? Will one do archival work or use secondary sources for the transversal axis, and how will such a decision influence the time available for work on other axes? Within a single axis, decisions must also be made. In a multi-scalar project on educational policy, will one emphasize the school, district, or state scale (e.g., Miesner’s chapter)? But those decisions must also be revisited as the study progresses, in relation to what is being learned, as it might require modifications (e.g., OlagbegiAdegbite’s chapter). The CCS scholar must regularly ask how many and which cases they need in their study. The study might start with a single case and add others; it might start with three cases, follow them for a period of time, and then shift the focus to one or two; it might add cases along the way (e.g., Wilinski’s chapter). CCS scholars ask whose perspectives are missing from debates, and what the consequences of that absence might be (e.g., Klapperich’s chapter). A CCS makes use of “phases” of research (e.g., chapters by Beneke and Adelman) and considers periods when scholars might need to focus to build more trustworthy relations before gathering observational and interview data, or when they may need to expand the study’s scope to determine whether insights from one site hold when re-examined in light of a broader set of cases. As Mario Luis Small reminds us in his 2009 article, “How many cases do I need?”, qualitative scholars need to think carefully about whether and when they are claiming to generalize empirically, theoretically, or both. These decisions require attention to sequencing as well. Should the scholar begin with a single case and then expand? Should they begin with multiple cases and then contract to a single case? There are other sequencing questions as well: Should the scholar conduct all case studies simultaneously or sequentially, and why (e.g., Bittencourt’s chapter)? What sequencing of methods—such as observations, interviews, or surveys—might produce the most robust data for the study (e.g., Cameron’s chapter)? Thus, the CCS

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approach requires constant attention to scope, specificity, and sequencing throughout the study. The CCS approach also integrates an interpretivist focus on meaningmaking with a processual notion of causation. The former maintains an “ethnographic sensibility” (Pader, 2006) in comparative work. As Simmons and Smith (2017) argue, this focus occasions “three core shifts in how scholars think about comparison” by “recognizing the limits of our ability to control in comparative research designs, appreciating the ways that meaning enhances comparative analyses, and focusing on processes as the object of comparison” (p. 126, emphasis added). They elaborate: “where political scientists typically compare similar or dissimilar outcomes, ethnographically oriented comparison highlights political processes—that is, the dynamics and practices that shape political life—as the proverbial outcome of interest” (p. 128, emphasis added). These three factors—an awareness of the limits of control (e.g., Cameron’s chapter), a recognition of meaning as a causal factor (e.g., chapters by Adelman, Beneke, Sikenyi, Toukan, and Wilinski), and a focus on processes (e.g., Bittencourt’s chapter)—characterize the CCS approach. Finally, drawing on a processual approach, our approach to case study research integrates a focus on change over time as the transversal axis of comparison. There is a presentist bias in much of the existing case study methodological literature. For example, Yin (2014) defined a case study as “an empirical inquiry that investigates a contemporary phenomenon (the case) in-depth and within its real-world context, especially when the boundaries between phenomenon and context may not be clearly evident” (p. 16, emphasis added). Instead, as we explain below, the transversal axis of comparison historically situates the processes or relations under consideration (e.g., chapters by Lou and Toukan).

The Comparative Case Study Approach and Book Overview Informed by variance and interpretivist orientations, and inspired and guided by a processual perspective, the CCS approach delineates three axes of comparison. The horizontal axis compares how similar processes and policies unfold in distinct locations that are socially produced (Massey, 2005) and “complexly connected” (Tsing, 2005, p. 6). The vertical axis insists on simultaneous attention to and across scales—while defining scales not as static, nested hierarchies from the local to the global, but rather, as critical geographers have argued, as socio-spatially produced (see, e.g., Howitt, 2003). The transversal comparison historically situates the processes or relations under consideration (see Bartlett & Vavrus, 2017 for a fuller description and multiple examples of each axis). Scholars who have used the CCS approach have conducted empirical studies that beautifully illustrate its utility and benefits (see Britton et al., 2019). However, they have also encountered dilemmas in putting this approach into practice. These challenges span the gamut, from the initial

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conceptualization of a study to its design and implementation during fieldwork to data analysis and the generation of theory. These provocations have spawned new designs, or new angles on existing designs, as well as new conceptual and methodological directions. In what follows, we have organized the chapters around four challenges and the design solutions the researchers developed to address them. The first section in the new designs portion of the volume is entitled Conceptualizing Cases and Case Selection. These chapters emphasize the importance, in a comparative case study, of carefully selecting cases, possibly during different phases of work, while continuously reflecting on how those choices may afford or limit new insights. In Chapter 1, Abigail Beneke presents her CCS that examines how staff members across three schools in a single Wisconsin school district interpreted and communicated their understandings of discipline reform. Given decades of research demonstrating racially inequitable school discipline and a more recent national reckoning with racial injustice, U.S. schools and districts are under increasing pressure to reform school discipline. As Beneke explains, approaches like restorative justice and socio-emotional learning offer alternatives to the zero-tolerance discipline policies that have been shown to result in harsh and inequitable punishment for Black, Latinx, and Native American students, students with disabilities, and students at the intersections of these identities. Beneke shows how staff across the three schools responded to a similar landscape of policies and pressures to produce novel school discipline policies. Methodologically, Beneke demonstrates the value of a pilot stage of research and the importance of a “broadening phase” in site and case selection. Furthermore, she points to the analytic possibilities presented by centering policy artifacts in CCS research. In Chapter 2, Elizabeth Adelman compares how Lebanese and Syrian teachers working in Lebanon with refugee students understand their academic, emotional, and social obligations towards the children in their classrooms. She argues that, while they identified similar needs, the teachers often prioritized different goals. Lebanese teachers remained focused on the academic development of their students, while Syrian teachers prioritized social and emotional needs, based often on their own personal experiences as refugees. Adelman asks whether comparison runs the risk of overemphasizing difference, how (and when) to maintain or jettison a relativist, non-judgmental stance, and the potential dangers of emphasizing teachers’ meaning-making without an adequate focus on larger systems. The second section, Balancing Specificity and Generalizability, addresses the challenge faced by many comparative qualitative researchers as to how to balance the need for rich, deep data while including multiple sites. This is often done to achieve greater transferability (Lincoln & Guba, 1985) or generalizability, defined here as forming general statements from specific cases (Schwandt, 2001).

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Olayinka Olagbegi-Adegbite, in Chapter 3, considers language in education policy in linguistically heterogeneous schools in Lagos, Nigeria, where public primary school teachers are responding to two somewhat contradictory language policies: the federal policy, which requires that they teach in the “language of the immediate environment” when in so-called “monolingual communities,” and the state policy, which requires Yoruba language instruction and dress once a week. Olagbegi-Adegbite examines how public primary school teachers understand and implement these conflicting policies in their multilingual classrooms. She elected to spread her observations and interviews across 12 schools and 30 teachers in a bid to enhance the generalizability of her findings. Olagbegi-Adegbite shows that most teachers knew nothing about the national policy; in contrast, they were familiar with the state language policy but implemented it more symbolically than linguistically. The findings have significant implications for equity, learning, and education policy in multilingual communities. Her closing reflection offers useful insights regarding how comparative, qualitative researchers consider the trade-offs of breadth and depth, as well as scope and specificity, in their fieldwork. In Chapter 4, Maurice Sikenyi compares peace education programs in two Kenyan universities. In an effort to address persistent ethnic tension in the country, peace and conflict studies programs have proliferated. In his study, Sikenyi finds that, though the universities had very different missions and organizational structures, faculty at the two universities utilized peace knowledge to design contextually relevant peace curriculum that reflected local ways of knowing about peace. The chapter reveals processes, events, and lived experiences that shaped participants’ conceptions of peace in ways that espoused a “Kenyan” way of knowing about peace, which Sikenyi argues is critical for the sustainability of peace in the region. The chapter uses horizontal comparison of markedly different institutions and investigates the factors that result in surprisingly similar outcomes. In doing so, Sikenyi uncovers a motivating emic concept—Kenyan peace knowledge—that merits future exploration. The third section, Enabling Processual Analysis across Sites and Scales, emphasizes the fit between the comparative case study approach and Maxwell’s (2013) process approach. He defines it as “an open-ended, inductive approach” to investigate how political economic phenomena intersect with and influence cultural and social processes (p. 83). These chapters take up such investigations as they compare across sites and scales, simultaneously or sequentially. In Chapter 5, Tiago Bittencourt asks how social class affects opportunities in two International Baccalaureate programs in Ecuador, one a low-income public school and the other an elite private school. He chose to work in both sites simultaneously, alternating days at each site. He also employed a relational approach to comparison, which acknowledges and incorporates how participants themselves are actively comparing their experiences with

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their understandings of different sites and scales in the effort to make sense of previous experiences and deliberate future ones. Drawing on the emic concept of buenos buscones [good searchers] and the emergent concept of “collaborative advantaging,” Bittencourt argues that varying conceptions of achievement have important implications for the IB Diploma Programme initiative and are informative for broader conversations about social reproduction in Ecuador. Throughout the chapter, Bittencourt highlights how relational comparison and a processual analysis helped him remain open to serendipitous findings while also addressing the material and temporal constraints of fieldwork. Helen Rose Miesner, in Chapter 6, explores how teachers, constrained by school, state, and U.S. federal requirements and guidance, have enacted and engaged with the federal legal mandate to provide a free, appropriate public education (FAPE) to students with disabilities during the COVID-19 pandemic. The chapter draws on a year of virtual and face-to-face fieldwork, including observations and a series of interviews with teachers. She also engaged in document analysis of federal, state, and school policies and budgets and interviews with federal and state staff to construct a comparative case study that examines how policies and guidance created and implemented across scales informed the adaptation of policy in practice. Miesner found that, while participants across the policy spectrum invoked FAPE as a core guiding policy during the pandemic, they did so with varying emphases on how it could be delivered and what it encompassed. Further, Miesner shows that the practical constraints of virtual schooling contexts and organizational features of schools resulted in a narrower enactment of FAPE at the school level than that described in federal statute. Methodologically, Miesner demonstrates both the importance and challenges of examining policy contradictions and appropriations across multiple scales and at different depths, determining what to foreground at what moment for what purpose. She also illustrates the value of shifting focus and methodological strategies as the inquiry unfolds. The fourth section, Addressing the Transversal Axis, highlights two chapters that have a particularly strong temporal dimension to their studies. In Chapter 7, Elena Toukan discusses how she came to question the conceptualization of the transversal axis during the course of her research. Toukan’s work in the Indigenous territories of southern Chile and periurban communities of the Central African Republic examines how local communities assert different visions of education and development. Toukan first describes her efforts to employ the conventional axes of the CCS: the horizontal axis to draw connections and juxtapositions across differing experiences; the vertical axis to unpack the policy and relational dynamics of each case, from transnational funders to local actors; and the transversal axis to explore the historical situatedness of processes and relationships. However, in the process, Toukan began to question the very nature of time and change, recognizing that the temporal bounding of data collection represents cases in a particular moment and narrative position that may or may not be

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meaningful to the community. Instead, she found that the communities in her study simultaneously engaged with much broader time horizons, as well as with numerous points in time simultaneously, in their approaches to local education and collective well-being in ways that defied conventional paradigms of development. Toukan suggests that the power of engaging the transversal axis in community-based case study research rests not only in analyzing historical contexts and descriptions of change, but also in questioning the nature of temporality outside of researchers’ taken-for-granted assumptions. Although the CCS approach has been used in other longitudinal studies, Jingjing Lou’s research in Chapter 8 adds an unusual twist by comparing the findings from two longitudinal projects in China. The first was a longitudinal ethnographic research project of rural children in Northwest China conducted between 2005 and 2012; the second study, conducted from 2015 to 2019, involved migrant children in East China. Lou examines (re)interpretations and uses of suzhi (quality) and suzhi education by rural and migrant students and educators in the context of rapid urbanization in China. These studies, which Lou compares and contrasts throughout the chapter, explore the meanings of suzhi for different stakeholders in these different time periods and locales in both formal discourses, such as in the curriculum, and in informal discourses, as seen in what educators and students value and practice. Lou shows how the concept of suzhi reflects the rural-urban education gap and social stratification in China, and her analysis reveals the shifting educational paradigm of quality education in the country. This chapter illustrates how the CCS approach can be used by scholars to question takenfor-granted dichotomies, such as the urban-rural divide, through comparative research that allows for the close examination of concepts like suzhi across space, time, and with different populations. Further, Lou demonstrates the surprising value of comparing, post-hoc, two longitudinal studies done in different regions that themselves are examining change over time. Each of the chapters in this volume illustrates new twists in the authors’ use of the CCS approach, but the three chapters in New Directions, the fifth and final section, offer new methods and novel participants for future researchers. They illustrate how visual methods, discourse analysis, and research with young children can be incorporated in ways that generate new understandings through comparative case research. Wilinski’s analysis in Chapter 9 is framed by the Sustainable Development Goals, specifically Goal 4.2’s call to ensure access to high-quality preprimary education (PPE), as well as the tool assessing PPE subsequently developed by UNESCO, the World Bank, and Brookings Institution. Wilinski employs video-cued ethnography (Tobin, 2019) to investigate how global ideas about early childhood education quality as reflected in this assessment tool intersect with local conditions for children, parents, and teachers in three regions of Tanzania. Wilinski produced short videos of different types of play-based education, showed participants the videos, and

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held discussions about them as a way of eliciting their implicit views on educational quality. Her findings reveal that two major foci of the evaluation tool—play and child-centeredness—were not central to Tanzanian participants’ assessments of how early childhood education could be improved. This study responds to the need for contextually relevant definitions of quality education for young children (UNESCO, 2017; Raikes et al., 2020), and it extends the CCS approach with the use of video-cued ethnography. In Chapter 10, Leanne Cameron focuses on the work of an English language teacher association in Rwanda, ATER, founded to encourage teacherdriven professional development at the time of a policy shift around medium of instruction and pedagogy. Recognizing that ATER is heavily influenced by global English language industry powerbrokers, Cameron uses a Foucauldian discourse analysis of policy documents to trace discourses emanating from national and global contexts. Then, employing network ethnography that included focus groups, sequential interviews, observations, and innovative visual methods, she examines how those policies and discourses are differentially taken up, deployed, and contested by ATER leadership and ATER educators. Cameron questions her own positionality as a global and local actor, productively denaturalizing the over-stratification of scales. With a Foucauldian analysis of circulation, Cameron complicates efforts to assign causation to a specific level in a CCS. In sum, this chapter shows how to trace the “how” of neoliberal discursive transfer across global, national, and institutional policies and practices. In Chapter 11, Alex Klapperich applies the CCS approach to interrogate how the purposes of pre-kindergarten, alongside children’s status and rights, have shifted in response to the dominance of economic-centered rationales for early childhood education and care (ECEC). She draws on literature in the New Sociology of Childhood, which sees children as agentic knowledge producers (Marshall, 2016), to highlight the value of consulting children on education policy. Through a critical discourse analysis (Fairclough, 2003) of policy texts, Klapperich identifies the discursive mechanisms that Minnesota’s policymakers adopt to rationalize ECEC spending as a means to forge a competitive workforce and address the state’s “opportunity gap.” Then, through a critical narrative analysis (Souto-Manning, 2014) of semi-structured interviews and classroom observations, she compares how ECEC students, their parents, and their teachers frame the purposes of prekindergarten, and how these narratives offer alternative possibilities for imagining the social value of ECEC. Additionally, Klapperich demonstrates the value of child-centered research methods to include the perspectives of young children as well as the utility of engaging multiple approaches to textual analysis. In sum, the 11 chapters in this volume illustrate the value of combining the CCS approach with other methodological techniques, such as visual methods, discourse analysis, longitudinal approaches, and child-centered methods. They also emphasize the importance of a processual stance and

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relational comparison no matter what methods one uses. Furthermore, these chapters suggest the potential of using multiple simultaneous or sequential methods, such as surveys, observations, and interviews, and the promise of comparing findings across methods when they are combined with discourse and narrative analyses.

Conclusion The authors in this book grappled, in productively disparate ways, with the affordances and constraints of the comparative case study approach. Most fundamentally, they made decisions about what was comparable, how, and to what end. Independently, the authors devised new and fruitful ways to delimit the study without prematurely bounding it. They made decisions about which comparative axes to use, how to conceptualize them, and when to foreground or de-emphasize them. They engaged a processual approach to case studies, deciding how to modify case selection, participant sampling, and multiple or mixed methodological techniques as they developed new insights. In the process, the authors analyzed the trade-offs between scope and specificity in accordance with their vision of transferability and generalizability. Taken together, these chapters provide auspicious new designs and new directions for comparative case study research. References Abramson, C., & Gong, N. (2020). Introduction: The promise, pitfalls, and practicalities of comparative ethnography. In C. Abramson & N. Gong (Eds.), Beyond the case: The logics and practices of comparative ethnography (pp. 1–30). Oxford University Press. Appadurai, A. (1996). Modernity at large: Cultural dimensions of globalization. University of Minnesota Press. Bartlett, L., & Vavrus, F. (2014). Transversing the vertical case study: A methodological approach to studies of educational policy as practice. Anthropology & Education Quarterly, 45(2), 131–147. Bartlett, L., & Vavrus, F. (2017). Rethinking case study research. Routledge. Bartlett, L., & Vavrus, F. (2018). What’s wrong with case studies? Pitfalls and promises. Teachers College Record [online]. http://www.tcrecord.org ID Number: 22234. Becker, H. S. (2009). How to find out how to do qualitative research. International Journal of Communication, 3, 545–553. Britton, A., Schweisfurth, M., & Slade, B. (2019). Of myths and monitoring: Learnercentred education as a political project in Scotland. Comparative Education, 55(1), 30–46. doi:10.1080/03050068.2018.1541667. Fairclough, N. (2003). Analyzing discourse: Textual analysis for social research. Routledge. George, A. L., & Bennett, A. (2005). Case studies and theory development in the social sciences. MIT Press. Gerring, J. (2004). What is a case study and what is it good for? American Political Science Review, 98(2), 341–354.

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Howitt, R. (2003). Scale. In J. Agnew, K. Mitchell, & G. Toal (Eds.), A companion to political geography (pp. 138–157). Blackwell Publishing. Landman, T., & Robinson, N. (Eds.). (2009). Sage handbook of comparative politics. Sage. Lee, C. K. (1998). Gender and the South China miracle: The two worlds of factory women. University of California Press. Lee, C. K. (2020). An ethnography of comparative ethnography: Pathways to three logics of comparison. In C. Abramson & N. Gong (Eds.), Beyond the case: The logics and practices of comparative ethnography (pp. 139–161). Oxford University Press. Levinson B. A., Winstead T., & Sutton M. (2020). An anthropological approach to education policy as a practice of power: Concepts and methods. In G. Fan & T. Popkewitz (Eds.), Handbook of education policy studies (pp. 363–379). Springer. doi:10.1007/978-981-13-8347-2_17. Lincoln, Y. S., & Guba, E. (1985). Naturalistic inquiry. Sage. doi:10.1177/ 144078338702300329. Marcus, G. E. (1995). Ethnography in/of the world system: The emergence of multisited ethnography. Annual Review of Anthropology, 24, 95–117. Marshall, L. (2016). Lessons from the “new” sociology of childhood: How might listening to children improve the planning of education for development? IDPR, 38(1), 55–74. Massey, D. (2005) For space. Sage. Maxwell, J. A. (2004). Causal explanation, qualitative research, and scientific inquiry in education. Educational Researcher, 33(2), 3–11. Maxwell, J. A. (2013). Qualitative research design: An interactive approach (3rd ed.). Sage. Niesz, T. (2019). Social movement knowledge and anthropology of education. Anthropology and Education Quarterly, 50(2), 223–234. doi:10.1111/aeq.12286. Pader, E. (2006). Seeing with an ethnographic sensibility. In D. Yanow & P. SchwartzShea (Eds.), Interpretation and method: Empirical research methods and the interpretive turn (pp. 161–175). Routledge. Raikes, A., Koziol, N., Davis, D., & Burton, A. (2020). Measuring quality of preprimary education in sub-Saharan Africa: Evaluation of the Measuring Early Learning Environments scale. Early Childhood Research Quarterly, 53, 571–585. Ragin, C. C. (1992). Introduction: Cases of “what is a case?” In C. Ragin & H. S. Becker (Eds.), What is a case? Exploring the foundations of social inquiry (pp. 1–17). Cambridge University Press. Schwandt. T. A. (2001). Dictionary of qualitative inquiry (2nd ed.). Sage. Simmons, E., & Smith, N. (2017). Comparison with an ethnographic sensibility. PS: Political Science and Politics, 50(1), 26–30. Slater D., & Ziblatt D. (2013). The enduring indispensability of the controlled comparison. Comparative Political Studies, 46(10), 1301–1327. doi:10.1177/0010414012472469. Small, M. L. (2009). “How many cases do I need?”: On science and the logic of case selection in field-based research. Ethnography, 10(1), 5–38. doi:10.1177/ 1466138108099586. Soss, J. (2018). On casing a study versus studying a case. Qualitative and Multi-Method Research, 16(1), 21–27. doi:10.5281/zenodo.2562167.

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Souto-Manning, M. (2014). Critical narrative analysis: The interplay of critical discourse and narrative analyses. International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education, 27(2), 159–180. Stake, R. E. (1994). Case studies. In N. K. Denzin & Y. S. Lincoln (Eds.) Handbook of qualitative research (pp. 236–247). Sage. Stake, R. E. (1995). The art of case study research. Sage. Tobin, J. (2019). The origins of the video-cued multivocal ethnographic method. Anthropology & Education Quarterly, 50(30), 255–269. Tsing, A. L. (2005). Friction: An ethnography of global connections. Princeton University Press. UNESCO. (2017). MELQO: Measuring early learning quality and outcomes (Overview). https://www.brookings.edu/wp-content/uploads/2017/06/melqo-measuring-earlylearning-quality-outcomes.pdf. Vavrus, F., & Bartlett, L. (2006). Comparatively knowing: Making a case for the vertical case study. Current Issues in Comparative Education, 8(2) [Online]. http:// www.tc.columbia.edu/cice/Archives/8.2/82vavrus_bartlett.pdf. Vavrus, F., & Bartlett, L. (Eds.) (2009). Critical approaches to comparative education: Vertical case studies from Africa, Europe, the Middle East, and the Americas. Palgrave Macmillan. Xiang, B. (2013). Multi-scalar ethnography: An approach for critical engagement with migration and social change. Ethnography, 14(3), 282–299. Yin, R. K. (2014). Case study research: Design and methods (5th ed.). Sage.

Section I

Conceptualizing Cases and Case Selection

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Making Discipline Reform A Comparative Case Study of School Policymaking Abigail J. Beneke

Introduction In May 2021, the Shady Glen School District committee responsible for the district’s proactive discipline plan met over Zoom for the last time of the school year. After a year and a half of constant change—including shifts from remote instruction to various iterations of hybrid learning due to COVID-19—a district leader and 10 positive behavioral interventions support (PBIS) coaches from each school in the district met to discuss how they planned to wrap up the school year, what their work would look like over the summer, and how they would move forward in the fall. In a breakout room with elementary school PBIS coaches, one staff member shared that his school was working to integrate the district’s new anti-bullying curriculum with PBIS over the summer. Another coach explained that her school was “revamping” its school-wide expectations and expressed that she wanted to eliminate the term “respect” because it created subjectivity in disciplinary referrals recorded in the district’s online data management system. In the chat, another coach echoed her sentiment: “Yes, agreed. ‘Respect’ and ‘Safety.’” That same coach told the group that her elementary school was also “dismantl[ing]” its expectations. A fourth coach explained that her school changed their expectations two years ago, and was reexamining its commitments, integrating equity work with socialemotional learning (SEL). School discipline reform in Shady Glen mirrors a national push to reform zero-tolerance discipline that is disproportionately meted out to Black, Latinx, Native American, and disabled students when compared to their White, Asian, and nondisabled peers (Losen et al., 2015; Skiba, 2015). In 2014, the Obama administration issued a “Dear Colleague” letter threatening legal action by the Office of Civil Rights for districts with racially inequitable discipline (U.S. Department of Education, 2014). This letter advocated for the use of “conflict resolution, restorative practices, counseling, and structured systems of positive interventions” (U.S. Department of Education, 2014, n.p.), leading many states to discourage exclusionary measures (i.e., suspension and expulsion) and encourage PBIS, SEL, and more. While the DOI: 10.4324/9781003216551-2

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Trump administration rescinded Obama-era discipline guidance, many states continued their discipline reform efforts. In 2018, Wisconsin’s Department of Public Instruction adopted SEL learning competencies from the Collaborative for Academic, Social, and Emotional Learning (CASEL), a non-profit organization that “support[s] states, districts, and schools and convene[s] leading thinkers to ensure SEL is a priority in every school” (CASEL, 2021, n.p.). The Shady Glen SEL committee worked for three years to determine which of these learning competencies were most important to their district and decided to mandate the use of a CASEL-designated SEL curriculum, Second Step, in all its schools in the 2021–22 school year. To support their SEL work, the district invested in training from another CASEL-designated program for elementary and middle schoolers, Responsive Classroom, as well as from a non-CASEL designated SEL program, Developmental Designs, for high schoolers. In addition to SEL, the district mandated the use of a “LGBTQ and gender inclusive anti-bullying curriculum,” Welcoming Schools, in the 2021–22 school year (Welcoming Schools, 2021, n. p.). As I show below, given the same opportunity to reform school discipline, schools made their own versions of discipline reform that proffered distinct notions of the good school, good student, and good teacher (Maguire et al., 2011). In this chapter, I use the CCS approach developed by Bartlett and Vavrus (2017) to examine how staff members across three schools in a single Wisconsin school district, Shady Glen, interpreted and communicated their understandings of discipline reform. Through their work on various school and district committees, school staff at each school crafted novel behavioral frameworks that reflect and carry distinct school discipline policy discourses. Drawing on analysis of these behavioral frameworks, interviews with school staff, and observational field notes, I seek to answer the following questions: What policy discourses are reflected and carried by each school’s behavioral framework? How do school staff interpret these artifacts and policy discourses? This comparative case study highlights the methodological affordances and challenges of comparing across schools as they respond to similar policies and pressures, and it illustrates the importance of pilot research to the CCS approach. In the remainder of this chapter, I provide a brief review of the literature on school discipline reform and situate the analysis conceptually in the (1) sociocultural study of policy as practice; and (2) discursive formations embedded in policy artifacts. After detailing the design and methods, I present key findings from my analysis and conclude with methodological implications for the CCS approach.

The Politics of School Discipline Reform In response to growing awareness of racially disproportionate discipline, schools and districts have introduced several discipline reforms (Hirschfield, 2018; Turner et al., 2021). Therapeutic discipline reforms “define some

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misbehavior in medical or psychological terms and implement systems of behavior management based on therapy and rehabilitation” (Ramey, 2015, p. 2). They include PBIS, SEL, trauma-informed care/practices, mindfulness, and nonviolent crisis intervention. Many states provide technical assistance and training in PBIS (Hirschfield, 2018), which is a multi-tiered framework for using evidence-based, preventative behavioral interventions (Horner et al., 2010). Tier 1 PBIS interventions (e.g., school-wide behavioral expectations, positive reinforcement) are implemented school-wide, while Tier 2 and Tier 3 interventions (e.g., social skills groups, comprehensive behavior support plans) are designed for students who are not responding to primary and secondary interventions (Horner et al., 2010). A host of additional therapeutic approaches may be integrated into this tiered framework or implemented independently, especially social-emotional learning. It is defined as: the process through which all young people and adults acquire and apply the knowledge, skills, and attitudes to develop healthy identities, manage emotions and achieve personal and collective goals, feel and show empathy for others, establish and maintain supportive relationships, and make responsible and caring decisions. (CASEL, 2021, n.p.) SEL skills (e.g., experiencing self-efficacy, having a growth mindset) are often taught to all students (Tier 1) through direct instruction. Zones of Regulation is a framework and curriculum some schools use to teach SEL and aims to “foster self-regulation and emotional control” (The Zones of Regulation, 2021, n.p.). Zones of Regulation categorize emotional states into color-coded “zones”: blue, green, yellow, and red. Schools that use Zones often ask students to identify which zone they are in and seek to equip them with the tools to get to the “green” zone (i.e., calm, happy, ready to learn). Additional therapeutic approaches include trauma-informed care, mindfulness, and nonviolent crisis intervention. Trauma-informed care or practices aim to “minimize children’s ongoing exposure to adversity and unnecessary trauma triggers, while also strengthening supports and coping through individualized or more generalized approaches” (Herrenkohl et al., 2019, p. 374). A trauma-informed approach commonly focuses on preventing the re-traumatization of children through school punishment and supporting students in regulating their emotions. Mindfulness practices, such as breathing and stretching exercises, similarly aim to improve students’ academic and behavioral outcomes by decreasing stress and anxiety (Gutierrez et al., 2019). Nonviolent crisis intervention training teaches educators how to recognize the stages of an escalating crisis and deescalate them, using physical restraint as a last resort (NCI, 2021). In contrast to such therapeutic approaches to school discipline that emphasize the medical or psychological causes of student behavior or (mis)

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behavior, restorative justice theory emphasizes the moral and ethical obligations to “disrupt cycles of injustice and inequality” (Winn, 2018, p. 7). Restorative justice is a paradigm shift that involves relocating the focus from the (mis)behavior to harm done and to meeting the needs of both the victim and offender (Zehr, 1990). Restorative justice typically includes practices such as community-building and problem-solving circles and victim-offender reconciliation. While PBIS and SEL have been widely used at the national and state levels, restorative justice has been relatively absent from the state and federal discipline reform discourse, though several large cities (e.g., Oakland, Denver) have centered restorative justice in their discipline reform efforts (Hirschfield, 2018; Koon, 2020). Finally, while there has been a general trend away from criminalizing matters of school discipline, a small number of states have implemented anti-bullying laws that directly involve “police and criminal sanctions for traditional forms of bullying and harassment (without violence) at school” (Hirschfield, 2018, p. 48). In the focal school district, the City Council passed an ordinance in the 2019–20 school year that granted police the power to ticket parents of students labeled as “bullies,” while suggesting that schools ought to attempt restorative justice practices first. As I show in this chapter, therapeutic and restorative discipline reforms can become enmeshed with criminalizing approaches in practice, and the resulting school-level policies do not always unsettle the root causes of inequitable school discipline. Each of these approaches has been critiqued from critical perspectives. Therapeutic approaches have been critiqued for obscuring the underlying systems of oppression that negatively impact communities of color and for justifying existing power relations (Camangian & Cariaga, 2021). Though it explicitly aims for social transformation, in practice, researchers suggest that restorative justice can be used as a tool for social control (Lustick, 2017; Reimer, 2019), and anti-bullying legislation has been critiqued for criminalizing matters of school discipline (Hirschfield, 2018). In response to critiques, researchers have pressed for transformative and culturally relevant approaches to discipline reform that center the root causes of inequities (Bal, 2018; Ginwright, 2018). For example, transformative SEL “address[es] issues such as power, privilege, prejudice, discrimination, social justice, and self-determination” (Jagers et al., 2019, p. 163). Qualitative research on school discipline to date has focused on how staff implement particular reforms with students (e.g., Reimer, 2019; Warren et al., 2020), but it has not examined how multiple, at times contradictory, approaches to discipline reform are implemented simultaneously. In this chapter, I extend the scholarship on school discipline and its reform, examining how school staff respond to multiple discipline reforms through the creation of frameworks that reflect key discourses about student behavior.

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Conceptual Framework My analysis is guided by two complementary theoretical perspectives: (1) The critical, sociocultural study of policy as practice, and (2) the discursive formations embedded in policy artifacts. Policy studies have traditionally examined how a single policy is implemented as it moves from policy as text to implementation (see e.g., Mazmanian & Sabatier, 1983). Such “instrumental” scholarship assumes that policies move in a linear fashion as they progress from the level of policymaker to ground-level practice (Shore & Wright, 1997). However, more recent sociocultural scholarship suggests that this linear model disregards how policies work in practice (Levinson & Sutton, 2001; Levinson et al., 2009). Actors at each “level” of the policy chain—from federal lawmakers to those at state education agencies to district leaders—make and remake policy through their daily work (Hamann & Lane, 2004; Stein, 2004; Turner, 2020). At the school level, staff are often faced with multiple reform mandates and must respond to multiple policies and “strands within policies” (Ball et al., 2012, p. 4). It is through such “policy activity” (Colebatch, 2002) or “enactment” (Ball et al., 2012) that school staff and students translate, negotiate, and contest policy through their daily practice. From this perspective, teachers are policymakers who actively shape the policy process in their schools (Menken & García, 2020; Weatherly & Lipsky, 1977). Crucially, scholars have named the importance of an axiological commitment to examining power and inequality in sociocultural policy analysis (Levinson et al., 2009) and to the CCS approach more specifically (Bartlett & Vavrus, 2017). In line with this commitment, I attend to the way that hegemonic understandings of the social world are both challenged and reproduced in the process of school discipline reform. Key to understanding school-level policymaking are the artifacts or “concrete symbols representing more abstract policy and organizational meanings” made through the course of teachers’ work (Yanow, 2000, p. 14). Policy artifacts ranging from school handbooks to posters carry with them discourses about the meaning of the “good” school, student, and teacher (Maguire et al., 2011). Such artifacts call attention to recommended courses of action and show how schools represent their policymaking work (Maguire et al., 2011, p. 599). Artifacts carry with them discursive formations, or “practices that systematically form the objects of which they speak” (Foucault, 1986, p. 49). Indeed, artifacts communicate how school actors understand and express policy ideas, including what is deemed desirable behavior (Bernstein, 2000; Maguire et al., 2011). In this chapter, I anchor my analysis of school discipline reform using policy artifacts as representations of organizational identity and elucidate the distinct meanings of discipline reform that are made at the school level.

Design and Methods Data for this analysis were taken from a larger CCS of how teachers make sense of and enact discipline policies. The findings of this chapter are based

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on ethnographic data collected between January 2020 to September 2021. After conducting pilot interviews and observations in two school districts, I determined that a homologous horizontal comparison across three schools within a single district would yield the most promising design for studying the phenomenon of school discipline reform (Bartlett & Vavrus, 2017). Homologous horizontal comparisons “use units of analysis with a corresponding position at the same scale (e.g., two schools or two hospitals in one city)” (Bartlett & Vavrus, 2017, p. 20). By tracing school discipline across schools in a single school district, I aimed to compare how the schools responded to similar district, state, and federal policies and reform pressures. Though the larger project focused on all three axes (i.e., horizontal, vertical, and transversal), this chapter focuses on the horizontal comparison to highlight the differing ways that school-based educators who are given the same opportunity to reform school discipline interpret and enact it. Shady Glen is a suburban district experiencing rapid demographic change serving predominately White students. Shady Glen provides an ideal setting for this study for several reasons. First, like many districts across the country, Shady Glen is in the process of reformulating its approach to school discipline. The district had written restorative practices into its student handbook in the 2019–20 school year as an official response to behavioral “infractions.” The district has since removed language about restorative practices from the handbook and is mandating instead the implementation of Second Step SEL curriculum and Welcoming Schools anti-bullying curriculum in the 2021–22 school year. These are quite different from restorative practices in that they attend to the psychological dimensions of student behavior but do not typically address the moral and ethical dimensions of inequality and injustice. Despite this, Shady Glen explicitly named antiracism as part of its SEL approach. I selected three schools in Shady Glen for this comparative case study: two elementary and one middle school. I selected for similar cases in relation to the phenomenon of interest, namely, school discipline reform. These were the only schools in the district that were implementing restorative justice, according to principal interviews, and all three schools were also implementing several additional discipline reforms. Hillside and Pine Ridge Elementary Schools both serve a population of majority White students, followed by Black, multiracial, Asian, and Hispanic;1 both schools receive Title I funds. While Cedar Grove Middle School has a similar racial/ethnic makeup as the elementary schools, it has much higher enrollment and the percentage of students categorized as economically disadvantaged is roughly 10% lower than the elementary schools. Cedar Grove is the only middle school in the district where students who attended racially and economically segregated elementary schools are brought together. Thus, these three schools are similar in that they are all engaged in discipline reform but differ in terms of the racial/ethnic and socioeconomic makeup of the student body.

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For this analysis, I draw primarily upon data collected both in-person and virtually before and during the COVID-19 pandemic, including: school and district artifacts (e.g., behavioral frameworks, PowerPoints from staff professional development), 47 semi-structured interviews with school staff, and observational data from district and school meetings. Artifacts were deidentified (e.g., removing school mascots, school colors, identifying language) to preserve participants’ anonymity while maintaining the meaning of ideas expressed. To examine how school staff interpreted and communicated their understandings of discipline reform, I engaged in analytic memoing. Memos began as a brief place to capture patterns and themes early in the study and progressed into more elaborate reports that brought together multiple strands of data (Miles et al., 2014). Alongside analytic memoing, I engaged in first- and second-cycle coding of the data using both inductive and deductive coding (Saldaña, 2011). Finally, I created data displays identifying themes across the school behavior policies and participants’ discussion of school discipline and school discipline reform (Miles et al., 2014).

Findings Three main findings emerged from my analysis of the data. First, each school responded to the same district mandates by crafting distinctly different behavioral frameworks. For instance, Hillside developed the “5R Process”; Pine Ridge the “ARROW framework”; and Cedar Grove the “C-Grove framework.” These frameworks are important because they reflect discourses about what is desirable or problematic about students’ comportment (Maguire et al., 2011) and demonstrate how each school chose to represent their approach to discipline reform. Second, to move away from racially disproportionate school discipline, staff at the two elementary schools framed school discipline reform as a matter of students’ individual choices, emphasizing students’ responsibility to overcome negative emotions. This response paid limited attention to moral and ethical injustices, such as a history of inequity and systemic racism, which is a cornerstone of restorative justice (Davis, 2019). Thus, it is notable that the two schools integrated restorative justice into their frameworks to serve the aims of this individualizing approach. Finally, Cedar Grove Middle School explicitly named equity and justice in its framework. Cedar Grove leadership viewed discipline reform as one piece in a patchwork of academic and behavioral approaches. Yet, interview data demonstrate that criminalizing district policies posed serious challenges to the school’s ability to redress systemic inequities. In what follows, I illustrate my findings by examining each school’s behavioral framework in turn, beginning with Hillside Elementary’s 5R Process.

Hillside Elementary: The 5R Process In response to the high number of behavioral incidents and racial disparities in office referrals at their school, Hillside Elementary formed the Lion’s

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Pride Leadership Team in summer 2021. This was a group composed of school leadership (principal, associate principal, counselor/internal PBIS coach, psychologist), as well as a teacher representative from each grade level. The team aimed to develop a proactive process that would prevent student “behavioral errors,” such as name calling, shoving, or threatening others. Staff informed themselves of options by engaging in book studies and by drawing on their prior knowledge and experience, as well as other sources of information (e.g., Facebook). The resulting 5R Process, which The Lions Pride Leadership Team introduced to the entire staff at a February 2021 meeting, is composed of five steps (discussed below): 1. Regulate, 2. Relate, 3. Reflect, 4. Restore/Repair/Reteach, and 5. Record and Adult Reflection (see Figure 1.1). The 5R process begins with a priori recognition of a student’s behavioral error, defining the good student as one who is subject to adult authority and the good teacher as one who monitors student behavior. After an adult identifies a student’s behavioral error, the Regulate step involves the adult helping the student get to a calm state, or “get to green,” a reference to Zones of Regulation. Here, the student is framed as one who overcomes negative emotions and the adult as one who helps students deal with these emotions. Absent from this framing is a discussion of justified anger against systemic injustices. During the Relate step, adults are to “listen to student perspectives and show empathy” to understand students’ emotions and points of view. During the Reflect step, the adults and student discuss what happened to gain an understanding of the behavioral error and the impact it had on themselves or others. During this step, the team suggested that staff use “restorative questions” (e.g., What happened? What were you thinking/ feeling then?). In Step 4, Restore/Repair/Reteach, the adult and students are

Figure 1.1 The 5R Process

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to make a plan to restore relationships, repair harm, or reteach behavior. And finally, when the first “4 R’s” are complete, the adult is to decide how to Record the error, determining whether to record it as a major or minor referral in the district’s data management system, and Reflect on next steps individually or with other adults in the school (e.g., problem solving, reteaching). The 5R process is informed by the “3R” process created by the Southern Regional Advocacy Center that Principal Richter came across on Facebook, a center that provides training and technical assistance to child abuse centers. As Angie Palmer (counselor/PBIS coach) explained in a March 2021 interview, the leadership team determined that discipline was an issue based upon PBIS and SEL assessments and wanted to move away from a zerotolerance approach that assigned automatic penalties for behavioral infractions. Ms. Palmer sees the 5R process as a combination of several approaches, as she explained to staff at the February 2021 meeting: [The Lions Pride Leadership Team] really felt we needed to talk about proactive discipline. We wanted it to be rooted in teaching, giving feedback, repairing harm. The idea of a process everyone follows grew out of that. We wanted it to be a consistent way across staff, by everyone for everyone. Everyone has a chance to be trained on it, practice it, including kiddos. That will be the next step. And then moving through, moving away from a punitive mindset toward a learning mindset. It’s connected to SEL, restorative practices, trauma-informed practices… One of the key elements is it’s a practice that could help us address disproportionality in referrals. As this quote illustrates, this counselor/PBIS coach drew connections between the 5R Process and several behavioral approaches. The resulting framework advanced a discourse of the good school as one where students and teachers work together to help students overcome their negative emotions, with little acknowledgment of systemic injustices, such as racism, that may lead to justified anger. This framework also left unacknowledged how the school would address systemic injustices or support students in light of them.

Pine Ridge: The ARROW Framework Pine Ridge developed a distinct behavioral framework that relied on a similar individualizing discourse to Hillside’s behavioral framework. SEL remained the dominant thread at Pine Ridge, which focused on an individualistic notion of ownership and resilience—characteristics that students were “coached into” through explicit instruction on Zones of Regulation and through a compulsory “restorative process” with staff who were “on call” to respond to behavioral issues. The good student was framed as one who persevered through hardships, a discourse that placed responsibility on

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Black students who are disproportionately disciplined at Pine Ridge to regulate their behavior in line with school norms. The principal at Pine Ridge Elementary was explicitly hired to take a “tough on discipline” approach. Yet her growing realization that she was contributing to the school-to-prison pipeline caused her to search for better “tools” to address student behavior. Principal Schneider and Associate Principal Margaret Roberts, formerly the school psychologist, identified one of those tools—SEL Zones of Regulation—when Margaret was working with a student who was learning about Zones of Regulation in occupational therapy from an outside provider. Associate Principal Roberts worked with the 1st-grade student’s class to teach them about Zones, and later, all students at Pine Ridge were explicitly taught Zones of Regulation. Zones of Regulation language was evident in classrooms during observation in the 2019–20 and 2020–21 school years. In addition to SEL, staff at Pine Ridge identified a range of other sources that contributed to the 5R behavioral approach they designed, including mindfulness, restorative practices, Second Step curriculum, and Welcoming Schools anti-bullying curriculum. Principal Schneider explained that all of these approaches fall under the umbrella of PBIS. Pine Ridge “revamped” its behavioral framework in the 2018–19 school year before the start of my data collection. Students and staff voted on a new framework, ARROW (Acceptance, Risk-taking, Resilience, Ownership, and Working collaboratively; see Figure 1.2). Principal Schneider explained that this model encouraged students to set goals, monitor their own progress toward them, and take ownership.

Figure 1.2 The ARROW Framework

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ARROW is more a statement of values than a process to be followed. Each month, there is a school-wide focus on one of the letters in ARROW. Classroom teachers teach these values through direct instruction using PowerPoint presentations created by the school’s PBIS coach. Teachers also sometimes invoke these values in the classroom. For example, in a September 2021 classroom observation, a 1st-grade teacher explained to her class that a student was being resilient by “bouncing back” from being upset. ARROW advances a markedly individualistic notion of the good student, teacher, and school. Resilience, ownership, and risk-taking promote an understanding of “goodness” as perseverance through hardships on one’s own. Though this framework is less processual than the 5R Process, staff described a fairly similar process they follow when students are “dysregulated.” Staff have specific guidelines about when to call the behavioral “on-call” team, as social worker Alex Ferrier described in a March 2021 interview. When a student has passed a certain threshold of behavior, described in school guidance as “intent to harm or actual harm done as a result of the behavioral mistake” (e.g., using play weapon in a threatening way, foul language), the classroom teacher is to call the behavior on-call team, and someone from the team will come to their classroom to assist. On-call team members use what Principal Schneider called a “restorative approach” with students. She described how she would walk a student through this process in a February 2020 interview: I’m noticing that you seem to be in your yellow or your red zone today. Like, what’s going on right now? I mean, sometimes, you have to use distractions. We typically talk through, like, what happened […] So we try to work through that and then figure out what their repair will be. I usually have to talk to the other student to get their perspective as well and see if the proposed repair would fit their needs. Or if they have other ideas as well, then we usually go through that repair whether it’s a restorative conversation or something else. And then we have the student finish their work and then integrate them back into the classroom. Similar to Hillside, Pine Ridge Elementary integrated several approaches (e.g., SEL, PBIS, mindfulness, restorative practices) within its behavioral framework to promote a discourse of “good” student behavior as owning and overcoming difficulties through resilience. As an official school response to racially disproportionate discipline, Hillside implicitly placed responsibility on Black students, in particular, who have the highest rates of referrals, to change their behavior in accordance with school expectations. Embedded in this response is an understanding that the cause of racially disproportionate discipline is Black students’ behavior, rather than the school’s response to them or broader systemic inequities.

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Cedar Grove: The C-Grove Framework Cedar Grove Middle School’s behavioral framework offered a more critical and holistic response to racially disproportionate discipline. Similar to Hillside and Pine Ridge, Cedar Grove staff reported drawing on multiple behavioral approaches to craft their framework, which are mentioned in the framework itself (see below). However, unlike the other two schools, Cedar Grove explicitly named a commitment to “equity” and “social justice” and overall promoted a less individualistic approach to discipline reform. Despite this, as I show, Cedar Grove remained ensconced within criminalizing district policies that posed challenges to the school’s approach. In the 2020–22 school year, Gabe Bianchi began his first year as principal after formerly serving as the assistant principal. Under his leadership, Cedar Grove developed its C-Grove framework (see Figure 1.3), a reformulation of a previous behavioral framework. Similar to ARROW, the C-Grove framework articulates a set of values that ostensibly govern the school. Within each of its four core values—self-awareness, social awareness, increasing academic achievement, and well-being—a set of additional approaches and values are listed, including restorative justice, mindfulness, and culturally and linguistically responsive practices. The C-Grove framework describes the good student as one who takes care of themselves but is also socially aware, engages in restorative justice, is kind to others, and is “safe,” though this term is not defined. The good student recognizes the importance of equity and social justice and aims to increase their academic achievement. The good teacher uses practices such as restorative justice, mindfulness, and trauma informed care with students to improve their self and social awareness and well-being, along with their academic achievement. Interestingly, academics are included alongside behavior in the C-Grove framework.

Figure 1.3 The C-Grove Framework

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C-Grove branding is evidence throughout the school—from squishy “stress relief balls” affixed with the C-Grove logo to posters displayed in the halls and classrooms. According to Principal Bianchi, discipline and academics are integrated and dependent on student engagement: I mean, to me, the discipline is not like this separate thing that we do, just like I believe that the whole child is valuable. So, like, if you get the kid engaged in the arts, you get the kid engaged in the clubs, you can impact the discipline there. So, to me, the discipline thing is not separate. While there are many influences on Cedar Grove’s behavioral approach, including trauma-informed care and mindfulness, Principal Bianchi put a great deal of effort into restorative justice. As associate principal, he applied for a federal Alcohol and Other Drugs (AODA) grant to fund restorative justice training with a university professor. In the 2019–20 school year, through a combination of district and AODA funds, the principal rolled out a three-year plan to implement a tiered approach to restorative justice (in line with PBIS). He began the school year by requiring teachers to hold a community circle in their study hall at least once per week aimed at building classroom community and planned to advance to using restorative justice to solve conflict in the coming years. Just before the U.S. outbreak of COVID19, the school’s restorative justice coordinator, Matthew Graham, had trained students in one teacher’s classroom to be leaders, or Student Circle Keepers, of community circles during homeroom. Despite the strong restorative justice impetus at Cedar Grove, the school remained subject to district policies that relied on criminalizing discourses. As Principal Bianchi explained, the middle school continued to be governed by the district code of conduct that laid out ranges of punishments (e.g., suspension, expulsion) for given disciplinary offenses. Furthermore, the school had a School Resource Officer, representing a connection to zerotolerance discipline, though several staff members described the officer as a positive presence in the school. These district policies posed challenges to Cedar Grove’s ability to decriminalize school discipline and directly contradict the core values of restorative justice (Winn, 2018). My findings demonstrate that all three schools drew upon a host of approaches to create distinctively different behavioral frameworks at each school. At Hillside and Pine Ridge elementary schools, behavioral frameworks carried individualistic discourses that emphasized the importance of students being calm and “regulated,” and of overcoming “negative” emotions such as anger. This discourse placed responsibility for racially disproportionate discipline on marginalized students who were subject to disproportionate discipline to control their emotions and behavior in line with school guidelines. In contrast, Cedar Grove Middle School’s behavioral framework explicitly recognized equity and social justice and placed less

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emphasis on individualistic understandings of student behavior. Yet, interview data suggest there were limitations to Cedar Grove’s approach, which, like the elementary schools, remained within a criminalizing district policy context.

Discussion This study of school discipline reform raises several methodological considerations regarding the role of pilot research and site selection in CCS methods. When I began this study, I was primarily interested in restorative justice. Therefore, when I began collecting pilot data in two Wisconsin school districts in the 2019–20 school year—Shady Glen and Lake City, an urban district that serves a large population of predominantly low-income and Black students—I sought to identify schools that were implementing the approach. To identify pilot schools, I asked leaders close to restorative justice efforts in both districts to name elementary and middle schools that were implementing the approach. From these pilot interviews and observations, I learned that few schools across either district were implementing restorative justice, and district and school leaders were reticent to state that any schools were implementing the approach full-scale. Furthermore, I learned that all schools that were implementing restorative justice/practices were also implementing a host of other discipline reforms, including SEL, trauma-informed care, PBIS, and more. This “broadening phase” (Bartlett & Vavrus, 2017, p. 113) encouraged me to study the phenomenon of discipline reform rather than bounding the phenomenon of interest a priori to restorative justice. Though collecting pilot data added considerable time to my study, it was integral to my site selection and, ultimately, the focus of the study. Regarding site selection, the schools that I decided to include in the study offered several analytic affordances and yet also limited the claims that I could make about the relationship between discipline reform, student demographics, and geography. For example, my design allowed me to show how school staff in similarly positioned, categorically similar sites responded to a common set of district, state, and federal policies and pressures as they made sense of and enacted discipline reform. To be sure, distinctions between these various “levels” of policy are connected and “mutually influence one another” (Bartlett & Vavrus, 2017, p. 14). By selecting schools that were engaged in reforming their discipline policies and practices, I was able to examine the phenomenon of interest (i.e., discipline reform). Furthermore, by choosing a district experiencing rapid demographic change, I could show how school staff responded to a racially and socioeconomically diversifying student body—considerations that are central to the literature on school discipline. However, I could not make claims about how schools with starkly different demographics interpreted and enacted discipline reform, nor could I claim to show how schools in different districts or states engaged

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in this process. Though I initially considered a “nested” homologous comparative case study (i.e., examining discipline reform in two schools per district in two districts), my limitations as a solo researcher, including time limitations and length of commute to the schools, as well as school closings due to COVID19, influenced my decision to bound the study to a single school district. I reasoned that the depth of inquiry in a single school district was worth the trade-off for breadth of claims, consistent with a constructivist epistemology.

New Directions This study points to the analytic possibilities presented by centering policy artifacts in a comparative case study. The discursive role of visual artifacts has heretofore been under researched (Koh, 2009; Maguire et al., 2011), yet, as I have shown in this chapter, policy artifacts carry with them key discourses circulating in schools. Researchers may wish to center policy artifacts more fully in the CCS approach to examine the horizontal, vertical, and transversal axes (Bartlett & Vavrus, 2017). For example, future studies could analyze policy artifacts across distinct locations to understand their differing constructions of policy problems and solutions (i.e., horizontal). Scholars may interrogate policy artifacts to and across levels (i.e., vertical). And they could examine how, if at all, discourses have changed over time by comparing policy artifacts over a given time period (i.e., transversal). Certainly, researchers could examine any combination of these axes using policy artifacts as key sources of data for understanding policy discourses.

Discussion Questions 1

2

Beneke shows how staff across the three schools in one U.S. district responded to a similar landscape of policies and pressures to produce novel school discipline policies. How does the horizontal comparison support Beneke’s argument about the interpretation and communication of school discipline policy? Beneke uses a pilot study to refine her case selection. She restricted her study to one district, rather than working across two districts. She selected similar cases in relation to the phenomenon of interest: school discipline reform. Finally, she chose two elementary schools with similar demographics, while her middle school case had a higher enrollment and 10% fewer students categorized as economically disadvantaged. What do you think of her strategy to choose mostly similar cases? If she had selected more diverse cases, how would the methodology for the study need to be modified?

Note 1 Here, I use racial/ethnic categories reported by the U.S. Census Bureau in the 2020–21 school year.

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References Bal, A. (2018). Culturally responsive positive behavioral interventions and supports: A process-oriented framework for systemic transformation. Review of Education, Pedagogy, and Cultural Studies, 1–31. Ball, S. J., Maguire, M., & Braun, A. (2012). How schools do policy: Policy enactments in secondary schools. Routledge. Bartlett, L., & Vavrus, F. (2017). Rethinking case study research: A comparative approach. Routledge. Bernstein, B. (2000). Pedagogy, symbolic control and identity: Theory, research and critique. Rowman and Littlefield. Camangian, P., & Cariaga, S. (2021). Social and emotional learning is hegemonic miseducation: Students deserve humanization instead. Race Ethnicity & Education, 1–21. CASEL (2021). Our mission and work. https://casel.org/about-us/our-mission-work/. Colebatch, H.K. (2002). Policy (2nd ed.). Open University Press. Davis, F. (2019). The little book of race and restorative justice. Good Books. Foucault, M. (1986). The archaeology of knowledge. Tavistock Publications. Ginwright, S. (2018, May 31). From trauma informed care to healing centered engagement. Medium. https://medium.com/@ginwright/the-future-of-healing-shifting from-trauma informed-care-to-healing-centered-engagement-634f557ce69c. Gutierrez, A.S., Krachman, S. B., Scherer, E., West, M. R., & Gabrieli, J. D. E. (2019). Mindfulness in the classroom: Learning from a school-based mindfulness intervention through the Boston Charter Research Collaborative. Transforming Education. Hamann, E., & Lane, B. (2004). The roles of state departments of education as policy intermediaries: Two cases. Educational Policy, 18, 426–455. Herrenkohl, T. I., Hong, S., & Verbrugge, B. (2019). Trauma-informed programs based in schools: Linking concepts to practices and assessing the evidence. American Journal of Community Psychology, 64, 373–388. Hirschfield, P.J. (2018). Trends in school social control in the United States: Explaining patterns of decriminalization. In J. Deakin, E. Taylor, & A. Kupchik (Eds.), The Palgrave international handbook of school discipline, surveillance, and social control (pp. 43–64). Palgrave Macmillan. Horner, R. H., Sugai, G., & Anderson, C. M. (2010). Examining the evidence base for school-wide positive behavior support. Focus on Exceptional Children, 42, 1–15. Koon, D. S. (2020). Education policy networks: The co-optation, coordination, and commodification of the school-to-prison pipeline critique. American Educational Research Journal, 57(1), 371–410. Levinson, B., & Sutton, M. (2001). Policy as/in Practice: Developing a sociocultural study of educational policy. In M. Sutton & B. Levison (Eds.), Policy as practice: Toward a comparative sociocultural analysis of educational policy. Ablex. Levinson, B., Sutton, M., & Winstead, T. (2009). Education policy as a practice of power: Theoretical tools, ethnographic methods, democratic options. Educational Policy, 23(6), 767–795. https://doi.org/10.1177%2F0895904808320676. Lustick, H. (2017). “Restorative justice” or restoring order? Restorative school discipline practices in urban public schools. Urban Education, 1–28. https://doi.org/10. 1177%2F0042085917741725. Maguire, M., Hoskins, K., Ball, S., & Braun, A. (2011). Policy discourses in school texts. Discourse: Studies in the Cultural Politics of Education, 32(4), 597–609.

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Mazmanian, D., & Sabatier, P. (1983). Implementation and public policy. Scott Foresman. Menken, K., & García, O. (2010). Negotiating language policies in schools: Educators as policymakers. Routledge. Miles, M. B., Huberman, A.M., & Saldaña, J. (2014). Qualitative data analysis: A methods sourcebook (3rd ed.). Sage. Nonviolent Crisis Intervention (2021). Nonviolent Crisis Intervention. https://www. crisisprevention.com/Our-Programs/Nonviolent-Crisis-Intervention. Ramey, D. M. (2015). The social structure of criminalized and medicalized school discipline. Sociology of Education, 88(3), 181–201. Reimer, K. (2019). Adult intentions, student perceptions: How restorative justice is used in schools to control and engage. Information Age Publishing. Saldaña, J. (2013). The coding manual for qualitative researchers (2nd ed.). Sage. Shore, C., & Wright, S. (Eds). (1997). Anthropology of policy: Critical perspectives on governance and power. Routledge. Skiba, R.J. (2015). Interventions to address racial/ethnic disparities in school discipline: Can systems reform be race neutral? In R. Bangs & L. E. Davis (Eds.), Race and social problems: Restructuring inequality (pp. 107–124). Springer Science + Business Media. Stein, S. (2004). The culture of education policy. Teachers College Press. Turner, E. O. (2020). Suddenly diverse: How school districts manage race & inequality. The University of Chicago Press. Turner, E. O., Beneke, A. J., Velázquez, M., & Timberlake, R. (2021). The politics of the school-prison nexus: Racial capitalism, reform, and other challenges for education leaders. In A. Welton & S. Diem (Eds.), Strengthening anti-racist leaders. Bloomsbury Press. U.S. Department of Education. (2014). Joint “dear colleague” letter. https://www2.ed. gov/about/offices/list/ocr/letters/colleague-201401-title-vi.html. Warren, C.A., Presberry, C., & Louis, L. (2020). Examining teacher dispositions for evidence of (transformative) social and emotional competencies with Black boys: The case of three urban high school teachers. Urban Education, 1–27. https://doi. org/10.1177%2F0042085920933326. Weatherly, R., & Lipsky, M. (1977). Street-level bureaucrats and institutional innovation: Implementing special education reform. Harvard Educational Review, 47(2), 171–197. https://doi-org.ezproxy.library.wisc.edu/10.17763/haer.47.2.v870r1v16786270x. Welcoming Schools. (2021). Creating safe and welcoming schools. https://welcoming schools.org/. Winn, M.T. (2018). Justice on both sides: Transforming education through restorative justice. Harvard Education Press. Yanow, D. (2000). Conducting interpretive policy analysis. Sage. The Zones of Regulation. (2021). Welcome!https://zonesofregulation.com/index.html.

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Meeting the Needs of Refugee Learners A Comparative Case Study of Lebanese and Syrian Teachers’ Approaches to Educating Refugee Students in Lebanon Elizabeth F. Adelman

Introduction Education is an essential component of any humanitarian response, particularly in fragile and conflict-affected situations (FCAS) where access to quality schooling can provide children with physical, emotional, and cognitive protection. Teachers have a central role in ensuring these benefits become a reality in classrooms, yet they receive little guidance on how to achieve these goals. Few studies have examined how teachers work in countries impacted by conflict and whether and how teachers’ personal and/or professional positionality may influence their efforts as educators. This chapter considers how host-country and refugee teachers working in FCAS understand their academic, social, and emotional obligations towards the refugee children in their classrooms. To do so, I use a comparative case study (CCS) approach (Bartlett & Vavrus, 2017) to explore the process and perceptions of Lebanese national teachers working in national public schools and Syrian refugee teachers working in non-formal education settings. As teachers are embedded within schools, this is also the comparison of two different education systems, both working to support the education of the over 500,000 Syrian children seeking refuge within Lebanon’s borders (Government of Lebanon [GoL], 2015). Through this comparison, I find Lebanese and Syrian teachers identify many of the same educational challenges within their classrooms, with both groups striving to cultivate students’ growth and development. However, when faced with competing demands, teachers often prioritized different goals. Lebanese teachers focused on academic content, engaging in teachercentered pedagogy as a mechanism to progress through the curriculum as best as possible. In contrast, Syrian teachers placed social and emotional needs in line with or ahead of academic ones, prioritizing these goals due to their personal experiences as refugees. Differences between Lebanese and Syrian teachers’ approach to educating refugee students were in part a result of the different institutional expectations embedded within the corresponding DOI: 10.4324/9781003216551-3

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education systems in which these teachers worked. This comparison suggests ways to better prepare and support teachers from any background and in any setting to meet the many challenges and responsibilities rooted in their work. In what follows, I first provide an overview of the contextual background and conceptual framing for this study. Next, I present the study findings which center on how Lebanese and Syrian teachers approach educating and supporting their refugee students in relation to the opportunities and constraints afforded by the different systems in which they work. Finally, I consider how the CCS approach enables a multi-dimensional understanding of how teachers working in FCAS enact their roles as educators and what factors have influence over those processes.

Context Syrian refugees first began entering Lebanon in 2011, when conflict between the Syrian government and opposition forces escalated. By 2015, when this study took place, there were approximately 1.5 million Syrian refugees in Lebanon, a country with a national population of only 4.5 million people; an estimated 42% of these refugees were of school age (3–18 years) (GoL, 2015). This influx of refugees placed immense pressure on Lebanon’s already weak public services and added another layer of complexity to a long history of tense political, economic, and social relations between Syrian and Lebanon (Le Borgne & Jacobs, 2016). In May 2015, the GoL requested the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) to halt registration of new refugees, making it difficult to estimate Lebanon’s refugee population. Regardless of the exact figure, Lebanon continues to host the highest number of refugees per capita in the world (UNHCR, 2021). During the 2015–16 academic year, approximately 157,000 refugee students enrolled in public schools in Lebanon: 66,000 into the morning program and 91,000 into a second shift program opened only for Syrian refugee students (UNHCR, 2016). Historically, Lebanon offered one schooling shift. However, in 2013, the Ministry of Education and Higher Education (MEHE) introduced a second shift for Syrian students at select public schools in response to the increased demand for education by Syrian refugees (Shuayb et al., 2014). Public schools in Lebanon tend to serve a more vulnerable population, as two-thirds of Lebanese families send their children to private or semi-private schools, which are considered to provide better quality education (CERD, 2016; Matter, 2012; MEHE, 2014). Lebanon has a centralized education system, and all public school teachers are supposed to follow the same national curriculum aligned with national exams. The experience of students attending public school in Lebanon has been documented as negative and unproductive, with a reliance on teacher-centered pedagogy, out-dated disciplinary practices, and limited support for student learning (Bahou, 2016).

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In addition, Lebanese and international organizations have established education programs, referred to here as non-formal schools, for Syrian refugee students. Non-formal schools in Lebanon use a variety of curricula including an adapted version of the Lebanese curriculum or a curriculum from another country; they are not accredited, certified, or recognized by MEHE, and students cannot sit for national exams. In accordance with Lebanese law, public schools employ only Lebanese teachers while teachers working in non-formal schools are often Syrian (Shuayb et al., 2014). With no government oversight, teachers in these settings often have more flexibility regarding what and how they teach.

Conceptual Framing Education in settings directly or indirectly affected by armed conflict can be productive or destructive for both individuals and societies (Machel, 1996; Sinclair, 2001; UNHCR, 2012). Cross-national evidence demonstrates teachers are among the most central contributors to ensuring children experience a constructive, quality education (Conn, 2017; Glewwe et al., 2011); teachers are central to the possibility of education being protective and productive in conflict settings (Winthrop & Kirk, 2008). Global documents on teachers for refugees, such as the INEE Minimum Standards for Education (2010), UNHCR’s Education Strategy (2012), and UNESCO’s Guidebook for Planning Education in Emergencies and Reconstruction (2006), outline three categories of obligations for teachers: academic, social, and emotional. Teachers are expected to create safe, positive learning environments that protect their students’ physical and psychological health. Teachers should create inclusive classrooms that promote students’ self-esteem and selfworth, encourage cooperation and tolerance, and foster a positive vision for the future (INEE, 2010; UNESCO, 2006; UNHCR, 2012). Teachers’ pedagogy and classroom practices should develop students’ academic knowledge, as well as their skills related to peace development, conflict-mitigation, and social responsibility and integration (UNESCO, 2006; UNHCR, 2012). Teachers are supposed to be prepared to support students’ psychological and emotional healing and to provide a familiar routine to restore some sense of “normalcy” into students’ lives (INEE, 2010). National and international actors set these obligations, yet they are given shape and form by teachers who often have not heard about these standards in their daily work (Richardson et al., 2018). The relationship between teachers and students shapes teachers’ pedagogical approaches, the obligations they set for their students, and how teachers evaluate students’ behavior and academic performance (Dee, 2004; Santoro, 2009). Student-teacher relationships also have a significant influence on students’ social and emotional development impacting students’ motivation to learn (Wentzel & Wigfield, 1998), their feelings of belonging and sense of identity (Goodenow, 1993), and their ability to develop prosocial

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behavior (Pianta & Steinberg, 1992). In the context of conflict, student-teacher relationships are especially critical, as students may have few other opportunities to establish stable, trusted connections with adults (Betancourt & Khan, 2008). Little is known about the actual teaching processes implemented in classrooms in conflict settings (Penson & Yonemura, 2012; Richardson et al., 2018). Literature that does exist finds teachers are often unprepared to address the specific educational challenges refugee students bring to the classroom (Sesnan et al., 2013), including interrupted schooling, lack of exposure to age-appropriate content, and shifts in language of instruction (Dryden-Peterson, 2015; Mendenhall et al., 2015). During conflict, professional development is often neglected or stopped, leaving teachers unsupported in deciding how to adjust their pedagogy to the new challenging circumstances (Buckland, 2005; Penson & Yonemura, 2012). Even when teachers are provided specific training and support, they often still express uncertainty about how to meet the wide-ranging needs of their students (Kirk & Winthrop, 2007). National and refugee teachers may also perceive their roles in the education of refugee students differently, even though they are tasked with the same set of obligations. Differences in teacher and student country of origin are particularly pertinent to the present study, given the historical and contemporary political, economic, and social relationships between Lebanon and Syria.

Methodology This chapter involves two axes of comparison: the horizontal and the vertical. I compare horizontally the experiences of Lebanese teachers and Syrian refugee teachers working with refugee students in Lebanon. Yet, this comparison is also vertical and multilayered, as individual experiences are embedded in institutional systems. Lebanon’s national public school system is regulated by national policies and, since the influx of refugees, accountable to the global frameworks developed and promoted by the global organizations funding the country’s refugee education response. The non-formal schools are part of an informal network of education programs in Lebanon, accountable to a varying range of funders and communities, and present only as long as the need and the resources continue. Framing this work in relation to global strategies for refugee education allows for simultaneous horizontal and vertical comparison as I contrast throughout global expectations for refugee education with local realities of its implementation. For this study, I conducted ethnographic fieldwork in Lebanon during the 2015–16 academic year at three public schools and four non-formal schools. Three schools were located within the governorates of Beirut, the urban capital, and four in the Beqaa, which is a rural setting. The three public schools were randomly selected from the 2015–16 list of GoL schools hosting second shift programs, stratified by location and size of refugee student

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enrollment. All the public-school teachers I interviewed had a teaching degree or the equivalent. Only one teacher was in her first year of teaching. Sixty-two percent of teachers had taught second shift previously. Only three teachers (10% of the sample) had received any training for working with refugee students. For the horizontal comparison, I purposefully chose non-formal schools that closely mirrored the educational structure provided during the second shift in public schools. The four non-formal schools in this study followed the Lebanese curriculum and had structured academic goals for each grade level that students were required to pass to continue with their education. Across the four schools, 79% of teachers interviewed had finished their university training, while all had completed some education past secondary school. Sixty-five percent had formally taught before coming to Lebanon, and all had participated in training(s) designed to support the teaching of refugee students. I conducted in-depth semi-structured interviews with 62 teachers, 35 in non-formal schools and 27 in public schools, focusing on teachers’ understanding of their educational, social, and emotional obligations to students and how they adjusted their pedagogy to fit the needs they perceived among their students. I limited my sample to teachers working in grades 1 to 6, where most refugee students were enrolled. I also conducted 262 hours of classroom observations, including first and second shift programs. I worked closely with an Arabic-speaking research assistant throughout the data collection process because many interviews, classroom sessions, and school meetings were conducted in Arabic, a language I do not speak.

Findings: Teaching under New Circumstances In this section, I consider the challenges teachers of refugee students faced. I compare how national and refugee teachers reflected on and worked to meet students’ academic, social, and emotional needs and how their conception of students’ futures was influential across all domains. Academic Obligations: Different Goals Lead to Different Approaches Syrian and Lebanese teachers discussed similar issues regarding students’ academic development, yet the approaches teachers took to tackling these issues—including the goals they set for students, their efforts to adapt pedagogy and curriculum to meet students’ academic needs, and the level of responsibility they assumed for supporting struggling students—were often divergent. Adapting Learning Goals and Approaches Lebanese teachers pointed to the mastery of foundational skills as a central learning goal for refugee students as many entered the classroom far behind

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the level assumed within the curriculum. For instance, Asma, a Lebanese teacher, told me that the primary objective in her grade 1 English class “for the whole year” was to teach students the letter names and sounds and to read words, although according to the curriculum, 1st grade students should already be reading full sentences. In line with their teaching goals, most Lebanese teachers reduced the amount of content covered in each lesson to help students master the basic information about each subject. When teaching science, Adnan explained, “I teach very slowly… I don’t write any paragraphs. I only draw and label [diagrams].” Some teachers spent time reviewing material from an earlier grade level before embarking on the lessons for the current year, trying to rebuild what was forgotten, lost, or missing from students’ educational background. However, for many teachers, reducing the curriculum went hand in hand with the low expectations they held for their Syrian students. In her math classes, Adela tried to cover the basic concepts during the year but made little effort to teach more difficult material. She said, “Things that they do not need in their daily lives, or are a bit more complicated, I say—why should I bother their brains with it—because really they do not comprehend it. Why should I spend all this effort for nothing?” Adela decided to eliminate material she believed students could not understand, saving herself the “effort” of trying to teach difficult concepts, yet denying her students the opportunity to learn them. Eliminating lessons and simplifying content was an approach Lebanese teachers decided on for themselves within the confines of their own autonomy and classrooms. There was also no institutional support for teachers to collaborate on how to reduce lessons in their classroom and still ensure students were prepared for what would be taught the following year. Schools and teachers planned for the present school year but did not have the time or support to prepare for what might come next. When teacher’s articulated concern regarding students’ academic development during sporadic visits by MEHE staff to their classroom, “reduce the curriculum” was the only suggestion these staff members offered. While this approach gave teachers the freedom to create classes as they wished, it also placed an immense amount of responsibility on teachers’ shoulders, leaving them alone to determine what their students should and need not learn. In their classrooms, Syrian teachers also focused on teaching foundational skills, yet goals related to social and emotional competencies were often of equal, or greater, priority. For example, Hadia created a yearly lesson plan with academic milestones for her students, alongside which she developed a “social objective…lesson by lesson” to help teach students how to effectively manage personal challenges. In addition, many Syrian teachers pointed to the development of communication skills as an important learning objective for their students. As Farah described for her 1st-grade students, “I want them to learn numbers and letters. I want them to be able to verbally communicate with each other. I want them to learn and discover words that would help them interact with each other and express their thoughts.” Farah

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points first to key academic concepts and second to key social skills she believes her students are lacking. With no end in sight to the conflict in Syria, teachers were aware their students could spend many years, if not all their lives, outside of the country. It was therefore essential that, alongside academic knowledge, students gain the skills needed to interact with and understand different societies. Most Syrian teachers found it necessary to leave behind the type of teacher-centered pedagogy they had relied on in Syria. As Batoul explained, at first “I used my old method, but it didn’t seem fruitful. The students weren’t benefitting, they weren’t happy… I had to change my ways.” Through training and their own independent research, teachers like Batoul adapted to more activity-based, student-centered pedagogy to convey information and engage students with a wide range of academic levels more effectively. Syrian teachers also adapted academic content to align with the circumstances their students were facing outside the classroom. For example, teachers avoided questions about family, as some students had parents who were missing or had passed away in the war. When Hala taught a lesson on the four food groups, she knew “some students in my class are not getting the nutrition that they need. So, I limit my discussion,” focusing on foods families can afford and avoiding “things that the students cannot have.” Teachers believed their lessons were more effective and more inclusive when the content aligned with the realities of their students. Supporting Struggling Students In both public and non-formal schools, teachers had to address a wide range of skills and abilities in each of their classrooms. While all teachers wanted to see their students master the content, the support Lebanese teachers offered to struggling learners was often limited by time and by patience. Basma extended extra support depending “on the time I have in the class. If I have my time, I…take them aside and we work alone. If I don’t have enough time, I just try to encourage them to work harder.” Many teachers believed students who were not learning lacked the proper motivation, as opposed to the proper instruction, to succeed. Mazen did little to support students struggling in his math classes, explaining, “[students] who want to get better and work on themselves, they will get better. On the other hand, the ones who don’t want to change or get better, they’ll stay the same.” Teachers often expressed a feeling of frustration towards students who had fallen behind, especially when they had no clear strategies to address the problems. As Asma recounted, “honestly I’m hopeless. They are hopeless. I can’t do more than my effort and more than what I’m doing in the classroom.” Faced with new demands in her classroom, Asma believed she had pushed her skills to the limit and could do little more for students who, in her words, “don’t want to listen…don’t want to learn.” Implicit in Asma’s response is the dearth of support available to her as a teacher, leaving her on

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her own to navigate a set of challenges that are new both to her and to her students. A select number of Lebanese teachers developed techniques for supporting their struggling Syrian students. In Adnan’s science class, if a student failed a test, he tried never to give the student a poor grade. “It’s not nice to put a zero,” he explained. Instead, he allowed the student to repeat the exam at home or take it orally so their ability to write would not impact their ability to demonstrate content knowledge. Nadine found a combination of peer support and teacher guidance often helped the struggling students to grasp new material. For example, when solving problems on the board, if a student was unable to answer a question with her support, she would call on a friend to explain the concept. In response, a student was often motivated to solve the next problem alone “so that his friend won’t have to explain for him” a second time. Syrian teachers also felt challenged by students who were not advancing in their classrooms. However, they were less likely to place the responsibility of learning on the shoulders of the students, but instead tried to look for and address the root causes of a student’s poor performance. Aya remembered her 11-year-old student Mariam, who at first could not hold a pencil and refused to speak. Aya spent time observing Mariam, working with the school staff, and meeting with her parents. Aya learned Mariam had been treated poorly in her last school by the teacher and therefore worked hard to build a positive relationship with her: “I praise her and give her stars. I only ask her to solve questions on the board that I know she can do so that I can build her self-confidence. She now raises her hand to answer without being afraid…[Her] performance started getting better.” Mariam’s case was not unique; almost every Syrian teacher identified students in their classrooms who needed considerable support to advance academically. Consistently, teachers dedicated significant time and effort to these students, feeling compelled to help in some way, even when at times, their efforts were not always rewarded. When asked why she invested so much in Mariam’s development, Aya explained simply, “I am her teacher at the end of the day.” Syrian teachers often could not resolve the challenges their students faced outside of the classroom, yet they were conscious of these issues and tried to work within these limitations. As Firas explained, “Sometimes students’ circumstances affect their academic achievement and studies. For example, a student who is living in a tent will not have electricity to study…the student will not have the space to sit alone [and] concentrate… We take all of these things into consideration whenever we want to evaluate a student.” In addition to working closely with individual students, Syrian teachers described several techniques they used at the classroom level to support struggling students, including peer-mentoring and modeling, after-school tutoring sessions, and coordinating efforts with caregivers at home. While teachers reported feeling frustrated at times, Syrian teachers remained motivated to

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find and implement techniques to keep struggling students engaged and learning in the classroom. Social Obligations: Negotiating Relationships from Different Perspectives Teachers were aware of the complex and challenging circumstances Syrian students faced as they tried to establish some semblance of normalized life in Lebanon, a country whose government does not formally recognize their status as refugees (Lebanese Center for Human Rights, 2016). In the face of these challenges, Lebanese and Syrian teachers developed varying approaches to support Syrian students’ integration into their temporary home and to foster tolerance among students. Addressing Challenges of Integration Lebanese teachers had some understanding of the difficulties Syrian students confronted as they tried to reestablish their lives in Lebanon as refugees. However, teachers rarely discussed issues related to students’ integration into Lebanon directly with their students, as many felt they did not have the time or the responsibility to broach the subject. As Lamia explained, “You have only 45 or 50 minutes… I don’t have time to discuss…their problems, and what they are feeling, so I am just giving my lesson and that’s it.” According to Nadia, teachers “don’t do anything” in relation to integration. “I go in, I teach, and I leave;” anything else “is not my responsibility.” Time and again, teachers referenced the temporality of students’ presence in Lebanon, suggesting minimal responsibility for helping students address social issues they might be facing within this new context. As Ranya explained, there was no need to help students “adjust to living in Lebanon given that eventually, they will go back to their home country.” However, Lebanese teachers still played an active role in refugee students’ experience of integration, even if it was not intentional. The fact that Syrian students were spending time in Lebanese schools with Lebanese teachers served to connect students to the new community and, in many cases, allowed teachers to foster and model positive relationships between themselves as Lebanese and their students as Syrians. As Manar explained, Syrian students “come to school and see the same things every day. It deletes the misconceptions that some students might have that Lebanese people do not like them because they came to Lebanon. When they come to school and deal with people who are kind to them, those misconceptions start to change.” For Aatifa, supporting students through the process of integration meant making her students feel welcomed in her classroom as well as welcomed in the country. “I’m a Lebanese teacher and I choose to teach them, so I have the responsibility to let them know [I accept them]. And it’s not their fault or their mistake to come to Lebanon. They are innocent people.” Teachers like Manar and Aatifa had no specific approach to supporting

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students as they struggled to settle into a new country, yet they believed their consistent presence in the classroom was one way to help refugee students feel more at ease in their new home. Syrian teachers reported that conversations related to the challenges of integration were common in their classrooms. Most teachers believed they shared some responsibility in supporting students’ adjustment to Lebanon and described a variety of approaches to helping students manage the experience. Teachers commonly tried to show compassion and a shared understanding for what students confronted daily. Nour wanted her students to feel that “we are all the same and I am experiencing the same thing… I don’t let students feel that they are the only one’s suffering… [Coming to Lebanon] was a shock to all of us, and we have to pass through certain stages to deal with this shock.” When students reported instances of mistreatment by some Lebanese, teachers often encouraged students not to draw assumptions about all Lebanese, based on the actions of a few individuals. Sana tried to teach her students that “one cannot judge all people based on the actions of one person. There are good Lebanese people and there are bad ones; we cannot generalize and say that all Lebanese are bad people. Even amongst us Syrians, there are those who are good people and those who are not.” In addition to promoting acceptance, teachers also encouraged students to just ignore poor behavior, recognizing that as refugees, students had few forms of protection within Lebanon. As Wafaa explained, “I am trying to make [Syrian students] understand not to provoke the Lebanese much, because they are being targeted… I am trying as much as I can to make them control their tongue and behavior. I am not teaching them to be weak, but returning insults would not lead them anywhere.” Wafaa felt responsible for teaching her students strategies that would protect them as refugees in the present but without damaging their self-confidence and personal strength, skills that they would need far into the future. Syrian teachers were acutely aware of the social challenges their students faced as they, too, confronted acts of racism, discrimination, and even violence due to their status as refugees in Lebanon. Some teachers found it difficult to separate the reality they encountered outside the school from what they advocated for inside the classroom. Maher felt that “the Lebanese people rejected the Syrians” making “it difficult for me to tell the student that he should fuse or adapt in the Lebanese society… I cannot teach a student how to adapt in a society that is rejecting him.” While he may not actively discourage students from associating with Lebanese, Maher found it hard to encourage positive interactions with Lebanese given the ways in which he saw and experienced the country’s treatment of Syrians. Promoting Tolerance Lebanese teachers described a variety of approaches to address and improve student behavior, most often vacillating between encouraging love and

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connections among students and reprimanding and punishing troublemakers. When Nadine observed Syrian students hitting each other, sometimes she would “yell at them and punish them. Then I realize that this isn’t their fault, it’s the environment they are living in. So, I apologize and talk to them calmly, saying that we shouldn’t hit or harm our friends, instead we should love them.” Like most teachers, Nadine had a general sense of what factors may be influencing students’ behavior, pointing to “the environment they are living in,” but she had never spoken directly to her students regarding their circumstances outside of school and the causes behind this conflictive behavior. Without a clear understanding of what was dividing students, teachers tried to foster tolerance by focusing on what students did share: their nationality. When Majeda would observe a student fighting, she would speak to the student “to tell him that he’s first your classmate. He’s Syrian like you. He’s maybe from the same city that you come from. You have to love each other; you don’t have to fight with each other.” However, few teachers reported this approach as successful. More often, Lebanese teachers were frustrated that behavioral issues were distracting from academics, and that they had few tools, and even less time, to address the underlying tensions among students. Syrian teachers were also discouraged by the amount of time and energy they dedicated to addressing student behavior, especially as often their efforts seemed short-lived. As Rayya explained, “From Monday to Friday, there is progress. They go two days home, they come back the same person as like the way you started.” Despite feeling that change was an uphill battle, Syrian teachers still actively found or created opportunities to teach tolerance and acceptance in their classrooms. Aabira described engaging her students in roleplaying activities to teach the concept of respect, as simply telling students to respect their peers would not lead them to “understand what respect is.” Hadia believed school was not just a place for academic development but also a place for learning, “first, how to love and get along with each other, then to face the outside.” She applied this perspective to formal and informal lessons in the classroom. For example, during art class, two children came to her arguing over their drawings of the Syrian flag, one a depiction of the Syrian revolutionary flag and the other the Syrian regime flag. “They started arguing which flag is ours, this or that, expecting me to answer them. I asked both of them if they had a house and they both replied with a no, so I said what about we find a land where we can build a house on, and then we argue about the flag.” Hadia used a shared sense of loss and shared need for hope as a means of diffusing tension between students. In using the collective “we,” she also demonstrated how as fellow refugees, she and the students were united in circumstance, if not in political belief, a fact that should bring them together, not push them apart. Emotional Obligations: Navigating Student Experiences with Conflict Teachers discussed a plethora of difficulties students experienced that impacted their emotional well-being, including separation from their home,

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surviving traumatic events such as bombing raids or the arrest of family members, or suffering with the strains and stress brought on by poverty and instability. Lebanese and Syrian teachers chose to address students’ lived experiences as refugees in different ways within the classroom, varying in how they balanced the role of educator with the role of caregiver.

Developing Identity In public schools, Lebanese teachers spent little to no time teaching refugee students about their Syrian identity. Most teachers never considered discussing Syria, as lessons related to the country were not included in the official curriculum. As Michelle stated clearly, “We do not learn about Syria. In the afternoon, we teach them Lebanese lessons, not lessons related to their country.” For Michelle, who taught grade 6 civics, giving only “Lebanese lessons” meant teaching Syrian students what it meant to be a Lebanese citizen, an identity to which they could never have formal access. Other teachers avoided topics related to Syria altogether, worried that allowing students to talk about the country would inevitably lead to students arguing, and possibly fighting, over Syrian politics and current events. Yet when teachers did find ways to integrate the topic of Syria into the curriculum, they were often impressed with the positive reaction the subject received. Leila would rarely discuss Syria in class as “there is nothing about Syria” in the curriculum. However, for the lesson on “My Country,” she remembered asking students “to describe one beautiful area from their country, and they wrote! Some chose a city from their country, like Homs, Aleppo, or Damascus. It’s like I brought back a feeling of nostalgia.” For Leila, giving students the opportunity to reflect their own identity in their schoolwork provided students with greater motivation to engage in the task at hand. Syrian teachers, in contrast, felt it as their responsibility to build a stronger bond between their students and their homeland. Farah began to incorporate lessons about Syria into her class when her students began saying they were “from” the Lebanese town they currently lived in. “I feel sad for this generation because they are Syrians, but they do not know it… I feel sad that we are scattered and that our children have no sense of their identity.” Farah began to teach students the history and geography of Syria and to “show them pictures of how Syria was” to help students understand more of their own identity. Discussions about Syria also served to communicate to students that their stay in Lebanon was temporary and to encourage, and hope for, return. Batoul reflected, “I like to teach them that we must believe in Syria. I like to tell them that it’s our country and it is our duty to protect it, to rebuild it.” For Farah and Batoul, teaching about Syria meant developing a sense of national pride, a means of building connections among students, and an opportunity to plant the seed for a brighter possible future. Syrian teachers

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felt it important to incorporate lessons about Syria into the school day, yet like Lebanese teachers, they also recognized the subject could lead to difficult conversations and emotions within the classroom. Aabira acknowledged that asking her students to talk about Syria sometime brought up “rough memories” of loss or suffering. However, for her, these impressions of Syria were also important for students to grapple with as they represented, in her words, “the truth. We shouldn’t deny reality.” Emotional Support in Academic Settings There was considerable variation in the ways Lebanese teachers viewed their roles regarding the provision of emotional support and opportunities for students to share memories and experiences of conflict. Manar described trying to help students “forget about the unfortunate events” in Syria and instead “help them laugh and give them some hope or a chance to study.” While she believed it was “the teacher’s duty” to support her students, she felt neither she nor her colleagues had the correct training to help refugee students grapple with past and present experiences of trauma. Many teachers expressed a similar concern about their refugee students and their Lebanese students, suggesting that, in general, public schools were not prepared to meet the needs of any student demonstrating emotional stress, regardless of nationality. Other Lebanese teachers were less concerned with their ability to support students who had experienced trauma, as they believed their role was to focus on academics, not emotions. As Adnan explained, “I work on academic purpose not on emotional purpose.” With only two hours a week to progress through the curriculum, “I don’t have time to discuss emotional [problems].” Adnan knew little about the specific circumstances that might be impacting his students whom, he observed, “share their problems with each other” but not with the teacher. When students did share experiences with their Lebanese teachers, teachers often tried to steer students’ focus back to academics. Majida tried to keep conversations regarding difficult circumstances out of her classroom all together as she believed they did more harm than good to students’ well-being. “I don’t let them speak about the war in their countries, no. I want them to forget that, as much as I can… Poor them, there’s no way I get involved in such thing.” Majida’s preference not to “get involved” was an attitude many teachers shared, feeling strained by competing priorities and a lack of proper training and support to effectively manage the emotional and developmental impact of conflict and displacement on their students. In comparison, almost all Syrian teachers expressed the belief that they were an important emotional support for students, despite feeling unprepared for the role. Teachers were concerned students had little support at home given the strain families were experiencing and discussed various approaches to extending help. Muntaha actively encouraged her students to

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speak to her when they had no other outlet. “I make them feel that I am their refuge, that I can keep their secrets.” Other teachers drew on shared experiences to help students move forward, highlighting the unique ability these teachers had to comprehend and empathize with students’ past and present challenges. When students told Fadiya “that their house was bombed, I also tell them that my house was bombed as well… I try to show them that we share the same pain, but I show them that I am trying to be strong and that we have to continue living.” Teachers took the role of emotional support very personally, as if the care they extended to their students was akin to helping their own family. Sana described that when dealing with a child who has lived through a traumatic event: “I consider him or her as a son or a daughter. There is no way that I would allow my child to remain scared; I need to help him or her overcome that feeling and experience.” While most teachers at non-formal schools encouraged their students to confide in them, teachers often described feeling unprepared and unsure of the best way to support students. Haroun admitted that sometimes he felt at a complete loss regarding emotional support for his students. “I don’t know. I hug them and I tell them that things are going to be okay. I lie… Sometimes I just feel helpless and that I cannot help them, honestly.” Fatima considered as teachers as “responsible. I know I am responsible, but I just feel like I lack the tools necessary. Because words are very powerful… one word can build a character and another one can break it.” Several teachers shared a similar concern as to whether the responses they provided were correct, or if their words did more harm than good. With few outside resources or supports to draw from, teachers often gave advice based on how they were processing their own experiences often fearful, as Nawal explained, “that what I say to them is incorrect.” Despite this hesitation, teachers felt compelled to continue listening to students and made their best effort to support them as they processed very complex emotions.

Reflecting on the Comparative Case Study Approach The CCS approach allowed for a multi-layered comparison, uncovering dissonances both vertically, between the global vision of these obligations and the local realization of this work, and horizontally, between priorities and approaches of national and refugee teachers working in formal and nonformal school systems. The vertical axis of this study showed that global frameworks for teachers of refugee students attribute equal importance to academic, social, and emotional obligations with the expectation that teachers support students in all three domains. Yet, as evidenced in this study, teachers needed to make decisions about the kinds of support they could provide, given their skills, time, priorities, and comfort level. When confronted with an entirely new set of professional demands and expectations, teachers chose to rely on the most familiar tools they had at their disposal.

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The horizontal comparison also revealed how, and why, teachers may have relied on different tools. In this study, I did encounter dilemmas. Contrasting the stances of Lebanese and Syrian teachers runs the risk of overlooking or minimizing similarities. Furthermore, in identifying different approaches, it is difficult not to categorize one approach as more valid or more justified—particularly when the groups compared hold dissonant positions of power, as in this case. Lebanese teachers were citizens, with rights protected by the state, while Syrian teachers were all refugees, living in a society that offered no promises of security. The extra effort extended by a seemingly less powerful group sets a different tone for these findings. Yet, the position and power of Lebanese public-school teachers, particularly those working in the second shift, is itself precarious, if considered within the frame of Lebanese society. These teachers are most often poorly and irregularly paid, and they have been provided minimal preparation and support for a difficult and an essential role. Finally, while the emphasis of this chapter is on the situated experiences of teachers, it is important to consider the institutional, social, and political structures that mold those experiences, and often limit the ability of teachers to enact the obligations that they identify as essential to their students and to fulfill the promises schooling makes to the next generation.

Discussion Questions 1

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Adelman shows how Lebanese and Syrian teachers varied in the emphasis they placed on their Syrian students’ academic, emotional, and social needs. She attributes some of these differences to their professional training and to their personal experiences as Lebanese nationals or as refugees themselves. What might be other reasons for the differences in the priorities for these two groups of teachers? This chapter explores the relationship between global frameworks and local experiences. How might the analysis inform situations in other countries where both national and refugee teachers are working with refugee students? What lessons can be drawn from this analysis that might inform global policies for refugee education? In this chapter, Adelman chose primarily to compare the teachers rather than the educational systems. What are the advantages and disadvantages of this decision? In the study you are planning, what are you choosing to compare, what else might you elect to compare, and what differences might that decision make for your potential findings?

References Bahou, L. (2016). Why do they make us feel like we’re nothing? They are supposed to be teaching us to be something, to even surpass them!: Student (dis)engagement and public schooling in conflict-affected Lebanon. Cambridge Journal of Education, 1–20.

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Bartlett, L., & Vavrus, F. (2017). Rethinking case study research: A comparative approach. Routledge. Betancourt, T. S., & Khan, K. T. (2008). The mental health of children affected by armed conflict: Protective processes and pathways to resilience. International Review of Psychiatry, 20(3), 317–328. Buckland, P. (2005). Reshaping the future: Education and postconflict reconstruction. World Bank Publications. CERD. (2016). Statistical bulletin for the academic year. https://www.crdp.org/en/ statistics-bulletin. Conn, K. (2017). Identifying effective education interventions in Sub-Saharan Africa: A meta-analysis of rigorous impact evaluations. Review of Educational Research, 87(5), 863–898. Dee, T. S. (2004). Teachers, race, and student achievement in a randomized experiment. Review of Economics and Statistics, 86(1), 195–210. Dryden-Peterson, S. (2015). Education of refugees in countries of first asylum: What US teachers need to know about the pre-resettlement experiences of refugee children. Migration Policy Institute. Glewwe, P. W., Hanushek, E. A., Humpage, S. D., & Ravina, R. (2011). School resources and educational outcomes in developing countries: A review of the literature from 1990 to 2010. National Bureau of Economic Research. Goodenow, C. (1993). Classroom belonging among early adolescent students: Relationships to motivation and achievement. The Journal of Early Adolescence, 13(1), 21–43. Government of Lebanon. (2015). Lebanon crisis response plan 2015–2016. http://www. alnap.org/resource/20702. INEE. (2010). INEE minimum standards for education: Preparedness, response, recovery. https://inee.org/resources/inee-minimum-standards. Kirk, J., & Winthrop, R. (2007). Promoting quality education in refugee contexts: Supporting teacher development in Northern Ethiopia. International Review of Education, 53(5–6),715–723. Lebanese Center for Human Rights. (2016). Legal challenges by refugees from Syria in Lebanon. Lebanese Center for Human Rights. Le Borgne, E., & Jacobs, T. (2016). Lebanon: Promoting poverty reduction and shared prosperity. World Bank. Machel, G. (1996). Impact of armed conflict on children: Note by the SecretaryGeneral. United Nations. http://www.unicef.org/graca/a51-306_en.pdf. Mattar, D. M. (2012). Factors affecting the performance of public schools in Lebanon. International Journal of Educational Development, 32(2), 252–263. MEHE. (2014). Reaching all children with education in Lebanon. World Bank. https:// projects.worldbank.org/en/projects-operations/project-detail/P159470. Mendenhall, M., Dryden-Peterson, S., Bartlett, L., Ndirangu, C., Imonje, R., Gakunga, D., … Tangelder, M. (2015). Quality education for refugees in Kenya: Pedagogy in urban Nairobi and Kakuma refugee camp settings. Journal on Education in Emergencies, 1(1), 92–130. Penson, J., & Yonemura, A. (2012). Next steps in managing teacher migration: Papers of the sixth commonwealth research symposium on teacher mobility, recruitment and migration. Commonwealth Secretariat. Pianta, R. C., & Steinberg, M. (1992). Teacher‐child relationships and the process of adjusting to school. New Directions for Child and Adolescent Development, 1992(57), 61–80.

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Richardson, E., MacEwen, L., & Naylor, R. (2018). Teachers of refugees: A review of the literature. Education Development Trust. Santoro, N. (2007). ‘Outsiders’ and ‘others’: ‘Different’ teachers teaching in culturally diverse classrooms. Teachers and Teaching, 13(1), 81–97. Sesnan, B., Allemano, E. P., Ndugga, H., & Said, S. (2013). Educators in exile: The role and status of refugee teachers. Commonwealth Secretariat. Shuayb, M., Makkouk, N., & Tutunji, S. (2014). Widening access to quality education for Syrian refugees: The role of private and NGO sectors in Lebanon. Center for Lebanese Studies. Sinclair, M. (2001). Education in emergencies. In J. Crip, C. Talbot & D. B Cipollone (Eds.), Learning for a future: Refugee education in developing countries (pp.1–84). United Nations. UNESCO. (2006). Guidebook for planning education in emergencies and reconstruction. International Institute for Educational Planning. UNHCR. (2012). Education strategy: 2012–2016. https://www.unhcr.org/en-us/protection/ operations/5149ba349/unhcr-education-strategy-2012-2016.html. UNHCR. (2016). Global trends-forced displacement in 2015. http://www.unhcr.org/ statistics/unhcrstats/576408cd7/unhcr-global-trends-2015.html. UNHCR. (2021). Fact sheet: Lebanon. https://reporting.unhcr.org/sites/default/files/ Lebanon%20Fact%20Sheet%20August%202021.pdf. Wentzel, K. R., & Wigfield, A. (1998). Academic and social motivational influences on students’ academic performance. Educational Psychology Review, 10(2), 155–175. Winthrop, R., & Kirk, J. (2008). Learning for a bright future: Schooling, armed conflict, and children’s well-being. Comparative and International Education Society, 52(4), 639–661.

Section II

Balancing Specificity and Generalizability

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Language Policy and Early Grade Instruction in Nigeria A Comparative Case Study of Policy Awareness and Implementation Olayinka Olagbegi-Adegbite

Introduction Language policies are developed and implemented across multiple scales, influenced by agents, goals, processes, ideologies, discourses, and contexts (Johnson, 2009). Formal language policies may look quite different as they are enacted at the local level (Spolsky, 2004; Trudell et al., 2016). As Igboanusi and Lothar (2016) note, “language policies and linguistic practices …are often at odds” (p. 563). Language practices “reflect the language attitudes and goals of the populations of speakers, which may be either compliant or antagonistic to stated national policy goals” (Trudell & Piper, 2013, pp. 1–2). In multilingual contexts with official language policies, it is not uncommon to find de facto language policies exerting great influence on educational practices, especially when teachers lack adequate knowledge of formal language policies. Language policies significantly influence instruction in the early grades; research demonstrates that it is particularly challenging for students to learn how to read in a language they do not speak (Freeman & Freeman, 2011). Given the current global push to improve early grade reading instruction in Sub-Saharan Africa and other parts of the world (Research Triangle International, 2015; Trudell, 2012), there is a need to consider how language policies shape early grade pedagogy in multilingual classrooms. National language policies often do not have clear recommendations for what language(s) teachers should use to teach in multilingual communities, which is the reality in many urban settings in Nigeria. For instance, the National Policy on Education (NPE) in Nigeria has always equivocally recognized the need for instruction in local languages, especially in the early grades; the 2004 national language policy required instruction in the language of the immediate environment for the first three years of primary school. However, in a country with over 500 languages, it is unrealistic to expect that a particular language of the immediate environment can equally benefit every student in the classrooms. Meanwhile, the Lagos state language policy mandates instruction in Yoruba language on Wednesdays at both private and public primary and secondary schools across the state. The policy also DOI: 10.4324/9781003216551-4

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requires teachers to dress up in Yoruba traditional attire on Wednesday, while also making it compulsory for schools to sing the national anthem in Yoruba every day. This multi-sited comparative case study is therefore significant to help ascertain Nigerian primary school teachers’ awareness of the national and state-level educational language policies. I interrogate how primary school teachers from different localities within metropolitan Lagos navigate the complex sociolinguistic landscape of the state to implement the language policies within their early grade multilingual classrooms. Engaging a critical stance, this chapter asks: How do teachers’ teaching in linguistically heterogeneous settings interpret and implement national and state language policies in their multilingual classrooms? Adopting a CCS approach, I explore, through the horizontal, vertical, and transversal axes, the ramifications of national and state language policies in Nigeria, especially regarding teachers’ pedagogical practices within multilingual classrooms in various school settings. The reminder of this chapter is divided into five sections. In the first section, I present the conceptual framing of the chapter by highlighting the interrelatedness of language ideologies and social inequalities in the arena of language policy. The second section describes the research methods and data analysis. In the third section, I draw on policy documents and media reports to highlight the transversal and vertical axes of this comparative case study. The fourth section draws on interview and observation data to illuminate the awareness and implementation of language policy among primary school teachers. The last section presents a reflection on the utility of the CCS approach for my research while also illuminating the challenge of a wide horizontal axis in multi-sited case study research that also seeks depth of understanding of the central phenomenon.

Conceptualizing Language Ideologies and Social Inequality in Language Policies Language education policies respond to linguistic diversity and codify language ideologies, which are politically motivated beliefs about language and its uses. These politically motivated beliefs also reflect the persistence of colonial relations. Formal educational systems in most African countries were established by colonial powers, who decided which languages would be used in schools and for what purposes. Therefore, language policy is not neutral; rather, according Shohamy (2006), it is “embedded in political, ideological, social, and economic agendas,” with language policy applied to the education system serving “as the vehicle for promoting and perpetuating such agendas” (p. 55). Colonial language policies and educational systems continue to influence educational practice today across most of Sub-Saharan Africa. Language policies stem from and reinforce political, economic, and social inequalities. For example, Phillipson (1992) argues that the global spread of

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English has set up definite economic and political advantages for the core English‐speaking nations, forming a kind of linguistic imperialism. The prestige granted to English also advantages local elites. In the case of Nigeria, a former British colony, the selection of English as the nation’s official language privileges Nigerians elites, most of whom speak English at home and work, and further marginalizes poor and working-class Nigerians who do not have the same opportunities to learn English beyond the classroom (Adegbite, 2010; Obiegbu, 2014; Owolabi, 2012). The persistence of a preference for English and other colonial languages is widespread across Sub-Saharan Africa. As Trudell and Piper (2013) explain, “the attitudes and priorities of headmasters, teachers, and parents about language and education generally hold the deciding influence on school language practices” (p. 5). In other words, the appropriation of national education language policies within schools reflects the ideologies and goals of local decision-makers, as primary school teachers are also caught up in what I refer to as linguistic Eurocentricity. For example, Trudell and Piper (2013) observe that, despite the Kenyan policy of mother tongue-based education in early primary schools, which has been the policy since 1992, students in the first three years of primary school predominantly receive instruction in English instead of the mother tongue. In a similar study, Piper and Miksic (2011) find that English continues to be used primarily in rural primary school classrooms in Uganda and Kenya, despite mother tongue policies. The medium of instruction has profound implications for the reproduction of privilege and prestige through schooling. Therefore, there is a need to understand how and why primary school teachers appropriate language policies that call for English or a local language within their classrooms. The CCS approach is well suited for this study in that it affords and promotes multi-sited research across sites and scales (Bartlett & Vavrus, 2017). However, as I discuss at the end of the chapter, this approach also presents challenges for researchers seeking to do multi-sited studies that remain committed to understanding the specificity of each site.

Research Methods This chapter draws on a larger, multi-sited, qualitative research project that examined the impact of primary school teachers’ language policy awareness and implementation on early grade instruction in Nigeria. Engaging the transversal axis, I used document analysis to carefully trace how the notion of mother tongue education has changed over time in the language in education policies at the national level. I also used document analysis to compare national and state language policies across the vertical axis. Engaging the horizontal axis, I examined primary school teachers’ awareness and implementation of language policies. I worked in five local government education authorities (LGEAs, equivalent to school districts in the U.S.). Two are predominantly Hausa speaking; another two are predominantly Yoruba

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speaking; and the last one is linguistically heterogeneous. I collected data in 12 primary schools across these five LGEAs. The schools were purposefully selected to reflect the sociolinguistic landscape of the region where the study took place: Three of the schools had predominantly Hausa-speaking students; four had predominantly Yoruba-speaking students, while the remaining five represented speakers from different language groups. I wanted to understand how the linguistic composition of the different schools might inform how teachers implemented language policy. I utilized qualitative methods, including in-depth interviews and participant observation (Hornberger & Johnson, 2011), to explore and understand the ramifications of language policies on pedagogical practices among primary school teachers when teaching reading. I observed 33 classrooms to examine teachers’ reading pedagogies and the implementation of language policies across the 12 schools. I also interviewed 30 primary school teachers for this study: Of the 30 teachers, 11 taught Primary 1, 12 taught Primary 2, and seven taught Primary 3. Among the 30 teachers interviewed, 12 did not have any teaching certification, which reflects the national average, whereby about 38% of primary school teachers are not certified (Adeleye, 2020). To analyze the data, I adopted an iterative approach to qualitative research and data analysis, which combines inductive and deductive techniques to coding (Maxwell, 2013). I engaged both inductive and deductive coding techniques to help arrive at the conclusions drawn from this research. The initial stage of the data analysis required a careful reading of my field notes and listening to the recorded interviews to develop inductive codes. I derived deductive codes from the conceptual framework that guides the research. For instance, I used codes like language ideology and preference for English. Drawing on both sets of codes, I then wrote memos on emergent themes about the different categories and their relationships, which became useful for me in later analysis (Maxwell, 2013). I examined teachers’ responses to questions about state and national language policies to ascertain their awareness of either of the policies. I then compared teachers’ responses across grade levels (P1, P2, and P3), and I compared their interview responses to observation data to see how the state and or the national language policy shaped their reading pedagogies across grade levels. Finally, I compared across schools to highlight school and classroom-specific characteristics that shaped reading pedagogies across schools.

Transversal and Vertical Axes: Nigerian National Language Policy and Lagos State Language Policy Nigeria is a linguistically heterogeneous country, with more than 500 languages spoken (World Book, 2018). Yoruba, Igbo, and Hausa are the three indigenous languages with the largest number of speakers; English, the colonial language, is also the official language that is granted prestige. The multiethnic and multilingual makeup of the country generates complicated

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language-in-education issues, thereby making the development and improvement of early grade literacy challenging. Despite the global policy and pedagogy recommendation that early grade instruction should occur in the mother tongue, major challenges persist. The National Policy on Education (NPE) in Nigeria reflects these tensions. For example, the earlier version of the education policy recognized the “importance of language as a means of promoting social interaction and national cohesion and preserving cultures” (NPE, 2004, p. 16). It states: Thus, every child shall learn the language of the immediate environment. Furthermore, in the interest of national unity it is expedient that every child shall be required to learn one of the three Nigerian languages: Hausa, Igbo and Yoruba … The medium of instruction in the primary school shall be the language of the environment for the first three years. During this period, English shall be taught as a subject. From the fourth year, English shall progressively be used as a medium of instruction and the language of immediate environment and French shall be taught as subjects. (NPE, 2004, p. 16, emphasis added) The phrase “language of the immediate environment” is intended to promote mother-tongue instruction, but, in fact, students are not necessarily being taught in their home language. Given urbanization and migration, many children live in areas where their home language is not the dominant language at school. While Yoruba is traditionally associated with Lagos, three languages (Igbo, Hausa, and Yoruba) are widespread and commonly used. Across Nigeria, the language of the immediate community (LIC) is arguably English because of the role it plays in the nation’s politics, business, and education. Thus, the 2004 NPE was vague and open to multiple interpretations. Further, the policy has not been adhered to in many schools. My observations and those of other scholars show that English instruction is introduced as early as the 1st grade of elementary school (Bamgbose, 2005; Olagbegju, 2009). Despite the emphasis on the use of the language of the environment in education, Igboanusi (2008) claims that the policy has been “bedeviled by several impediments” (p. 729), one of which is the scarce supply of teachers who can teach in such languages. Implementation is therefore weak among educators. It is not unusual to hear English instruction from the first year of primary school onward. The 2013 revision of the national education policy sounds very similar to its precursor from 2004; however, policymakers inserted a brief but powerful phrase. The new policy states: “The medium of instruction in the primary school shall be the language of the immediate environment for the first three years in monolingual communities. During this period, English shall be taught as a subject” (NPE, 2013, p. 8, emphasis added). Indeed, the phrase “in monolingual communities” is problematic. This addition essentially

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negates the entire policy, as there are rarely monolingual communities in Nigeria. As Adetuyi (2017) rightly puts it, “Nigerian society is irretrievably heterogeneous” (p. 338). Monolingual communities rarely exist outside of extremely rural communities in Nigeria. Considering the linguistic landscape, and the high rate of mobility in Nigeria (Okhankhuele & Opafunso, 2013), the notion of monolingual primary schools is implausible; it is odd to see such a context centered in the national policy. Such classrooms certainly do not exist in urban areas, such as Lagos, the most linguistically diverse state in Nigeria. The revised language policy recommendation is therefore more vague and less supportive of multilingualism than the previous iteration. The 2013 policy has allowed English to flourish as the medium of instruction in public schools in most of Nigeria. The revisions further reinforce the hegemony of English, which is “pedagogically important as the language of instruction in virtually the entire school system in Nigeria” (Okonkwo, 2016, p. 52). Many schools in the country introduce English instruction as early as the 1st grade of elementary school (Bamgbose, 2005; Olagbegju, 2009). The language policy recommendations in the new NPE indirectly empower the continued use of English in schools. At the micro-sociolinguistic level, most urban areas have more than one LIC. In Lagos, for instance, there are significant numbers of people who speak Igbo, Hausa, and Yoruba. During my research, teachers talked about how many of their students lived in either predominantly Hausa or Igbo speaking communities, and how these children are expected to learn in Yoruba, a language that is not immediate to their community. Olagbaju and Akinsowon (2014) condemned the 2013 language policy, calling it “a shoddy attempt to escape the important question of which language [should] be used in a multilingual community as the medium of instruction…” (p. 125). Moreover, the 2013 NPE assumes that teachers can speak and teach in the “language of the immediate environment.” However, the process of hiring teachers is not always localized; teachers are as mobile as students, and they are not assigned to schools based on their own or their students’ linguistic profiles. Even if the teacher’s language matched that of the “immediate community,” it may not match the language of many of the students. Similarly, the recommendation in the new policy to teach in the “language of the immediate community” did not specify whose community—the teacher’s or the students’? It is thus not surprising to find English being used as a medium of instruction in schools (Ogunbiyi, 2008; Olagbaju & Akinsowon, 2014; Osborn, 2007). One way to understand the mention of “monolingual communities” in the 2013 NPE is to examine it from the angle of equivocation, a non-straightforward discourse that “appears ambiguous, contradictory, tangential, obscure or even evasive” (Bean, 2001, pp. 65–66). As such, the policy can best be described as an equivocation, an obviously contradictory and misleading discourse. Equivocation serves an important purpose; according to

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Bavelas et al. (1990), it conditions information aimed at maintaining socioeconomic relationships. In this case, one could argue that the policy allows Nigeria to signal to the global community that they have a mother language policy, while in practice it allows for English-medium instruction to flourish. Developing countries in the Global South rely on development aid from the Global North, and Nigeria is no exception; meanwhile, countries in the Global North continue to extend conditional development aid to countries in the Global South. These relationships can lead to equivocation on either side to maintain their relationships. Consequently, one may argue that considering the recent global attention to mother tongue education, especially as it relates to Africa, it is likely that some countries on the continent have found a way to either attract or sustain their relationships with global actors through equivocal language policies. One possibility is that the Nigerian government’s addition of the phrase “monolingual communities” to the 2013 language policy, is “an intentional use of imprecise language” (Hamilton & Mineo, 1998, p. 3), intended to signal multiple possible interpretations to different audiences. From all indications, obfuscating the language used to deliver instruction in Nigeria benefits the institutions involved in international aid relationships. This may also explain why the national language policy is not enforced in schools; in reality, the possibility of the national language policy being implemented in Lagos, and in most parts of the country, is mythical. Arguably, obfuscation also helps to further consolidate the use of English language in the education system. A mother tongue education policy requires significant investments in curriculum and teacher professional development. Ultimately, as Semali (2009) opines, “the language question is about power—a political choice that lies with governments and global players of geopolitics—aimed at redistributing power, privilege, and resources internationally as well as within an African country” (p. 196). Considering the issue of language in education in Africa from a global political and economic perspective allows for the possibility that equivocation in language policies may be intentional. One may argue that the shortcomings of the national language policy in Nigeria are one of the forces shaping state-specific language policies across the nation. For example, in 2018, the Lagos state government passed into law the Yoruba Language Preservation and Promotion Bill (Adeyemi, 2018). Under the newly enacted policy, primary and secondary school teachers are mandated to teach in Yoruba all day on Wednesdays and dress in Yoruba traditional attire; moreover, students are expected to sing the national anthem in Yoruba language every day. In these ways, the state language policy reinforces the national policy by insisting on instruction in a local language; in other ways, it contradicts the national policy by limiting instruction to Yoruba and limiting “local language” instruction in Yoruba to one day per week. Officials claimed it would “preserve” the language and culture while improving student learning. While delivering the mandate to

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public school principals and heads of teachers in a meeting, the former Deputy Governor of Lagos state, Idiat Adebule stated: Gov. Ambode wants me to pass this message to you, that henceforth, Yoruba language be made compulsory in both private and public schools. The national anthem must be sung in Yoruba on a daily basis too… We are also considering translating the textbooks of other subjects into Yoruba language because I believe that when students are taught in their mother language, learning will be easy, and their level of performance will improve. The state government is passionate about this law, so we do not lose our language, culture, and heritage. (Vanguard Nigeria, 2018) Despite this promise of cultural preservation, no teacher I observed had Yoruba-medium subjects textbooks in their classrooms. “Preservation” of language and culture was a central theme in discussions of the law, and politicians insisted that requiring all students to learn Yoruba would promote “unity.” For instance, responding to the new law, the Chairman of the House Committee on Education, Mr. Lanre Ogunyemi, said that Finland, Germany, and China require language testing for admission to higher education. He stated, “We need to adopt such to drive development and national unity” (Adams, 2018). The irony here is that requiring Yoruba privileges those who already speak it and disadvantages those who do not, creating not unity but inequality. This study therefore foregrounds teachers’ voices across different contexts to illuminate their interpretation and implementation of language policies and how such policies reflect linguistic inequity in the arena of early grade education.

Horizontal Axis: Teachers’ Awareness and Implementation of Language Policies The equivocal nature of Nigeria’s current language policy diluted its potential impact on classrooms and so, too, did its limited dissemination among the nation’s teaching force. The primary school teachers in this study, for instance, were generally unaware of the policy: Even though over 95% of the 30 primary school teachers interviewed during this study had been teaching for more than nine years, only one of them was aware of the national language policy. This finding corroborates previous research on language policy implementation in Nigeria. For example, in their survey of teachers in six southwestern states in Nigeria, Adeyemi and Ajibade (2014) found that the teachers were not aware of the recommended national language policy and, as such, “they taught in any language medium they found suitable during the teaching-learning process” (p. 98). This concern is not limited to Nigeria. In a similar study on language policy implementation in early grade classrooms in

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Kenya, Trudell and Piper (2013) observed that, rather than implementing the country’s multilingual language policy, primary school teachers predominantly taught in English language. In comparison, all 30 teachers interviewed in this study were aware of the state language policy, which mandated the sole use of Yoruba language on Wednesdays. The state language policy had a clear mandate, and it was wellpublicized across schools in Lagos. In addition, government officials held special meetings with education stakeholders to discuss the new state language policy and how the state would support schools to ensure compliance with and implementation of the policy. Major news outlets in Lagos state also covered reports on the new language policy. With the height of publicity that state language policy received, it would have been strange for teachers not to be aware of it. Yet, awareness does not indicate faithful implementation, and, in this case, most teachers continued teaching in English. When asked why they preferred to use English as a medium of instruction, even on Wednesdays despite the state language policy, the Lagos-based teachers explained that, in their multilingual classrooms, most students did not understand Yoruba. For example, when I asked Mrs. Adehun, a P1 teacher, why she mostly taught in English, she explained: “Hmm, English has become a norm; it is a norm. Maybe if we have Yoruba, we still mix it with English.” For Mrs. Adehun, English has become so normalized that it would not make sense to teach in another language. Moreover, she added, “If we just use only Yoruba, it will be tough; those children won’t understand anything. They won’t be able to speak English.” This teacher and others often said they used English because they believed the students should be able to speak the language like their peers in private schools. In essence, they saw speaking English as a social advantage they wished to confer upon their students. In addition, the teachers themselves had been educated in English and were most comfortable with it. The privileging of English as a medium of instruction in primary schools in Nigeria attests to the linguistic imperialism that continues to plague the implementation of local language policy in schools. As Mrs. Tutu, a P2 teacher with over 20 years of teaching experience, said to me when I asked her about her awareness of the national language policy, “You know English is a general language but now that they said Yoruba is compulsory, but English is what I know we usually use at school.” Despite the national and state language policies that recommend the use of local languages in the early grades, English was preferred among these primary school teachers in Lagos. Although all the primary school teachers that participated in this study were aware of the state language policy and its recommendations, they did not implement it as directed. For example, in addition to teaching in Yoruba language all day on Wednesday, the policy also demanded that the national anthem be sung in Yoruba every day and that teachers dress up in Yoruba

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traditional attire every Wednesday. To facilitate the singing of the national anthem in Yoruba, each school was provided with the Yoruba translation of the anthem so they could teach their students. All the schools I visited have the Yoruba version of the national anthem either inscribed on the wall where the schools usually gather for daily assembly or on the walls next to the chalkboard in each classroom. Two teachers made their students sing the national anthem while I was in their classrooms to show me that the students knew how to sing it. Apart from mandating the singing of the national anthem in schools, the state language policy also required the cultural showcasing of the Yoruba traditional attire on Wednesdays. Teachers were mandated to dress up in Yoruba attire to promote the local culture, whether they identified as Yoruba by ethnicity or not. I observed that this cultural attire showcasing was the only language policy mandate that teachers consistently adhered to because, as one of the teachers informed me: “all the schools must speak Yoruba on Wednesday and we must wear traditional attire. If inspectors come and find that we are not complying to the policy, they will query us” (Mrs. Toye, P1 teacher). Primary school teachers in Lagos were more eager to adorn themselves in Yoruba attire and quick to talk about how they make students sing the national anthem in Yoruba than they were to teach in the prescribed language of instruction on Wednesdays. They mostly ignored the pedagogical mandate of the policy while fully embracing its symbolic component. My observation in the classrooms also showed that teachers mostly adopted English as the medium of instruction, but they used Yoruba for informal moments and for scolding the students. For instance, while observing Mrs. Dada’s P3 classroom during a regular English language lesson, the teacher scolded a student who could not read a single word from the sentences that he copied on his notebook: e è é, Sanmí, so fún mi, ìwo náà so tòótó, sé mommy e mò pé o ò lè lo primary 4? O ti so fún mommy e nn´kan tí mo so? O ti so fún won; o ò lo primary 4 o! O kàn má a disturb ara e ni; ko yáa jókòó ní biyi torí èyí to ko yì í ò n s’ara è. [Sanmi, tell me, you too say the truth, is your mother aware that you will not move on to P4? You have told your mommy what I told you? You have told her? You are not going to P4 o! You will just disturb yourself; just sit right here because what you wrote is nothing.] In this quote, Mrs. Dada made it clear to Sanmi that he would not be moving on to P4 because of his lack of reading proficiency in English. Mrs. Dada, like her other colleagues, relied on Yoruba to address students on such occasions instead of using English. In enacting de facto language policies, which reflect English imperialism, primary school teachers apparently believe that they are addressing linguistic inequality in their classrooms. For example, one teacher said, “because most

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of them here too are Igbo children, so when you just teach with Yoruba others will not understand you” (Mrs. Aliyu, P2 teacher). Teachers also seem to believe that their actions are helping students learn English faster. As one teacher said, “You will notice that they cannot go for any competition; they always feel shy. They can’t talk in public, and not everybody hears Hausa but lingua franca English” (Mrs. Jaye, P3 teacher). Ironically, teaching English without adequate attention to the needs of second language learners is likely more detrimental than beneficial for the students. Studies have shown that, at the early grade level, children are better off being taught in their home language (Fafunwa, 1989; Freeman & Freeman, 2011; Heugh, 2000; Piper et al., 2016; Trudell et al., 2016). Students who are learning in a second or third language need specific types of support (Huang et al., 2020; Oliva-Olson et al., 2019). This includes textbooks in students’ home language, which these teachers in Lagos do not have, even in the case of Yoruba. All of the textbooks that were readily available in the schools in this study were written in English. In sum, the language policy provision in the National Policy on Education (NPE, 2013) is contradictory and confusing and, above all, equivocal. Asking teachers to use the language of the immediate environment to teach in monolingual communities, which hardly exist, complicates the linguistic realities in multilingual communities. Although Igboanusi (2008) opined that education in Nigeria faces a policy implementation problem, not a policy problem, the data from this study do not support this view. In fact, I would argue strongly that education in Nigeria does, indeed, face a policy problem that stems from the lack of recognition and acknowledgement of the nation’s robust sociolinguistic landscape. If a policy is problematic, it also affects its implementation. By adopting a comparative case study approach to investigate the issues of language policy in Nigeria, I found that the absence of a strong policy and its consistent implementation are serious problems that will continue to deprive young people of their right to education if no steps are taken to remedy the situation.

Reflecting on the Comparative Case Study Approach This study illustrates how the CCS approach can be used to investigate the ramifications of language policy and practice among teachers in multilingual settings. This approach helps to integrate and centralize comparison across the three axes. The transversal analysis traced how national language policy in Nigeria has shifted over time, with significant consequences for early grade literacy instruction. The transversal analysis in this study also highlighted the inconsistencies in language policy provisions and the shifts that have resulted because of them. A transversal analysis of language policies in Nigeria also helps to illuminate how inadequate the policies have become in reflecting the growing sociolinguistic landscape in the different regions of the country. The vertical comparison highlighted the differences and similarities

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between Lagos state and national language policies, on the one hand, and the national policy in relation to global education recommendations for mother tongue instruction on the other. Finally, the horizontal comparison homed in on teachers across 12 primary schools in five local government education authorities to understand their awareness and implementation of language policies for early grade instruction. My attention to all three axes helped to deepen our understanding of how language policies are appropriated across sites and scales. The CCS approach therefore helped to interrogate language policy awareness and implementation across multiple sites by capturing and comparing teachers’ early grade pedagogical practices. The approach further offers the flexibility and possibility of reimagining “the case” to focus on a phenomenon that can be investigated across multiple sites. Here, I explored how language in education policies were understood and appropriated by educators working in linguistically diverse schools. This approach offered more robust data on how language policies are interpreted and implemented among primary school teachers across communities. Although the CCS approach was helpful for the comparison across all three axes, such benefits did not come without some drawbacks. One of the most obvious had to do with deciding on the scope of the study. Lagos is characterized by a densely diverse sociolinguistic landscape; to truly capture early grade teachers’ language policy awareness and implementation in multilingual classrooms, I selected multiple schools that reflected different linguistic landscapes. However, including multiple schools resulted in me spending less time conducting research at each school. I was not able to immerse myself for an extended period in any of the schools that I studied because I wanted to establish a wider horizontal axis. Therefore, I may not have fully captured teachers’ pedagogical practices during my short visits because I did not have enough time to build strong relationships with the teachers to gain their trust before commencing observations. If I were to do the study again, I would limit the number of schools in the hopes that teachers would be more authentic in their teaching practices and more comfortable with me in their classrooms. Lastly, the flexibility of the comparative case study to compare across scales and sites with the option of tracing historically is valuable for qualitative research. However, if researchers are not intentionally disciplined, they may feel overwhelmed by trying to trace all three axes equally. For example, during my fieldwork, I came across historical and contemporary aspects of the central phenomena that were interesting, and I found myself trying to fit some of them into my study. However, I soon realized that incorporating more elements into my study would require more time in the field and more money, leading to a longer period in which to complete the dissertation. The CCS approach may lead researchers, particularly novice ones, to spread themselves too thin when looking across time, space, and scale. Yet, a study can also be fundamentally enriched with some, if not equal, attention to each of the three axes.

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Discussion Questions 1

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3

Olagbegi-Adegbite’s comprehensive examination of federal and statelevel language policies in Nigerian primary schools serves as the basis for her argument that teachers are selective in their interpretation and implementation of these directives. How did her tracing of the transversal, vertical, and horizontal axes in this CCS support her claim about how teachers employ language policy in the classroom? Olagbegi-Adegbite’s primary focus was on the horizontal axis of her study as she collected data in 12 primary schools across five local government education authorities (school districts). She notes that one of the challenges this breadth imposed was that she could not spend as much time at any single site, which limited her ability to describe each teacher’s pedagogical practice in detail. What are some of the key considerations for researchers doing multi-sited work in determining how many sites to include? Besides the breadth/depth trade-off, what might be some other dilemmas with which CCS researchers must contend in making these decisions? Qualitative researchers often decide to include more sites and participants in their studies to ensure some degree of generalizability of their findings. What affordances does the CCS approach offer when it comes to generalizability that conventional case study research does not? To what extent does generalizability concern you in the study you are designing and why?

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Akinnaso, F. N. (1993). Policy and experiment in mother tongue literacy in Nigeria. International Review of Education, 39, 255–285. Bamgbose, A. (2007). Linguistic diversity and literacy: Issues and way forward. In N. Alexander & B. Busch (Eds.), Linguistic diversity and literacy in a global perspective (pp. 23–30). Council of Europe. Bartlett, L. (2014). Vertical case studies and the challenges of culture, context and comparison. Current Issues in Comparative Education, 16(2), 30–33. Bartlett, L., & Vavrus, F. (2017). Comparative case studies: An innovative approach. Nordic Journal of Comparative and International Education, 1(1). Bavelas, J. B., Black, A., Chovil, N., & Mullett, J. (1990). Equivocal communication. Sage. Bean, D. F. (2001). Equivocal reporting: Ethical communication issues. Journal of Business Ethics, 29(1), 65–76. Fafunwa, A. B., Macauley, J. I., & Sokoya. F. (Eds.). (1989). Education in mother tongue: The Ife primary education research project (1970–1978). University Press Limited. Federal Republic of Nigeria. (2004). National policy on education. https://education. gov.ng/wp-content/uploads/2020/06/NATIONAL-POLICY-ON-EDUCATION.pdf. Federal Republic of Nigeria. (2013). National policy on education. https://educateto lead.files.wordpress.com/2016/02/national-education-policy-2013.pdf. Freeman, D. E., Freeman, Y. S., & Soto, M. (2001). Between worlds: Access to second language acquisition (3rd. ed.). Heinemann. Hamilton, M. A., & Mineo, P. J. (1998). A framework for understanding equivocation. Journal of Language and Social Psychology, 17(1), 3–35. Heugh, K. (2000). The case against bilingual and multilingual education in South Africa (Volume 3). PRAESA. Hornberger, N. H., & Johnson, D. C. (2011). The ethnography of language policy. Ethnography and Language Policy, 273, 289. Huang, T., Loerts, H., & Steinkrauss, R. (2020). The impact of second-and thirdlanguage learning on language aptitude and working memory. International Journal of Bilingual Education and Bilingualism, 1–17. Igboanusi, H. (2008). Mother tongue-based bilingual education in Nigeria: Attitudes and practice. International Journal of Bilingual Education and Bilingualism, 11(6), 721–734. Igboanusi, H., & Peter, L. (2016). The language-in-education politics in Nigeria. International Journal of Bilingual Education and Bilingualism, 19(5), 563–578. Johnson, D. C. (2009). Ethnography of language policy. Language Policy, 8(2), 139–159. Maxwell, J. A. (2012). Qualitative research design: An interactive approach (3rd. ed.). Sage. Nwokoro, C. V., Chima, F. O., Ubelejit-Nte, A. A., Enobakhare, E. O., & Uchem, O. J. (2020). Advancing English language education policy in consideration of multilingualism on national integration in Nigeria. Journal of Education & Social Policy, 7(1). Obiegbu, I. (2014). English language as a vehicle of social transformation in Nigeria. Journal of Modern European Languages and Literatures, 3, 104–117. Ogunbiyi, O. (2008). The challenges of language teaching in the 21st century. Pakistan Journal of Social Sciences, 5(4), 297–299. Okebukola, F. (2012). The views of Nigerian teachers in public and private primary schools on the teaching of early literacy in English. Literacy, 46(2), 94–100. Okebukola, P. A., Owolabi, O., & Okebukola, F.O. (2013). Mother tongue as a default language of instruction in lower primary science classes: Tension between

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policy prescription and practice. Journal of Research in Science Teaching, 50(1), 62–81. Okhankhuele, O. T., & Opafunso, O. Z. (2013). Causes and consequences of ruralurban migration Nigeria: A case study of Ogun Waterside local Government area of Ogun State, Nigeria. British Journal of Arts and Social Sciences, 16(1), 185–194. Okonkwo, A. F. (2016). Languages of education in Nigeria: Extent of implementation in the (UBE) schools in Ebonyi state. International Journal of Educational Methodology, 2(1), 51–58. Olagbaju, O. O. (2009). The challenges of using Nigerian languages in modern education. An unpublished paper presented as part of course work for TEE, 813. Olagbaju, O. O., & Akinsowon, F. I. (2014). The use of Nigerian languages in formal education: Challenges and solutions. Journal of Education and Practice, 5(9), 123– 127. Osborn, D. (2007). A survey of localisation in African languages, and its prospects. IDRC. https://www.academia.edu/1992864/A_Survey_of_Localisation_in_African_Langua ges_and_its_Prospects_A_Background_Document. Owolabi, D. M. (2012). Attaining linguistic proficiency in the EFL/ESL adult classroom through English for specific purposes: The Nigeria example. TESOL Journal, 6, 109–122. Oyetunde, T. O. (2009). Beginning reading scheme empowering teachers to help their pupils become good teachers. LECAPS Publishers. Oyetunde, T. O., Ojo, G., Korb, K. A., & Babudoh, G. (2016). Improving literacy instructional practices in primary schools in Nigeria: Strategies that work. Literacy Information and Computer Education Journal, 6(2), 2323–2328. Phillipson, R. (1992). Linguistic imperialism. Oxford University Press. Piper, B., & Miksic, E. (2011). Mother tongue and reading: Using early grade reading assessments to investigate language-of-instruction policy in East Africa. In A. Gove & A. Wetterberg (Eds.), The early grade reading assessment: Application and intervention to improve basic literacy (pp. 139–182). RTI Press. Piper, B., Schroeder, L., & Trudell, B. (2016a). Oral reading fluency and comprehension in Kenya: Reading acquisition in a multilingual environment. Journal of Research in Reading, 39(2), 133–152. Piper, B., Zuilkowski, S. S., & Ong’ele, S. (2016b). Implementing mother tongue instruction in the real world: Results from a medium-scale randomized controlled trial in Kenya. Comparative Education Review, 60(4), 776–807. Prah, K. K. (2009). Mother-tongue education in Africa for emancipation and development: Towards the intellectualisation of African languages. In B. Brock-Utne & I. Skattum (Eds.), Languages and Education in Africa: A comparative and Transdisciplinary Analysis (pp. 83–104). Cambridge University Press. RTI International. (2015). Results of the 2014 Hausa and English early grade reading assessments (EGRAs) in government primary and IQTE centers of Jigawa, Kaduna, Kano, and Katsina States. https://earlygradereadingbarometer.org/files/Nigeria% 20RARA.pdf. Salami, O. (2008). It is still “double take”: Mother tongue education and bi-lingual classroom practices in Nigeria. Journal of Language, Identity and Education, 2(2), 91–112. Semali, L. M. (2009). Indigenous pedagogies and language for peace and development. Language and power. In B. Brock-Utne & G. Garbo (Eds.), Language and power:

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The Promise of the Comparative Case Study Approach in Understanding Educational Program Design and Change Peace Studies Programs in Kenyan Universities Maurice Sikenyi

Introduction Over the past decades, conflict and violence in Sub-Saharan Africa has resulted in concerted efforts by regional and national bodies to establish long-term approaches to building sustainable peace in the region (Omeje, 2015). Attention has been given specifically to educational institutions as avenues for building a culture of peace, resulting in a proliferation of peace and conflict studies (PCS) programs in East Africa. In Kenya, the last decade saw cycles of post-election violence, ethnic-based clashes, and terrorism attacks, including attacks on higher education institutions, which created tension and insecurity across the country (Kriegler & Waki, 2009, KTJN, 2013; Gettleman, 2015; Gainer, 2015; Ombati, 2016). In response to the ongoing unrest, the Government of Kenya established a sector-wide peace policy guiding all sectors (government ministries parastatals, counties, and educational institutions) to address the challenges of conflict in the region (MoEST, 2014). A major outcome of these efforts was the development of a national peace education policy for elementary, secondary, and tertiary education (MoEST, 2014). The policy established a national peace education curricula in primary and secondary schools, and called upon higher education institutions (HEI), particularly universities, to support the national quest for social cohesion through research, training, and community action (GOK, 2008, 2015; MoEST, 2014). The policy’s focus on HEIs sought to build on the PCS programs and centers for peace and social justice that had been established during the mid-2000s. However, PCS programs are fairly new in Africa, having originally started in Europe and the U.S. after World War II (Lopez, 1985; Harris et al., 1998; Harris, 2010; UNESCO, 1945). This chapter focuses on faculty approaches to the design and teaching of peace at two Kenyan universities. The chapter draws from a larger project that examined the relationship between higher education and peacebuilding DOI: 10.4324/9781003216551-5

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in Kenya (Sikenyi, 2019), in which I examined how conceptions of peace, held by national officials, university administrators, faculty, and students, influenced the design and instruction of peace and conflict programs in Kenyan universities and students’ experiences in those programs. The research used the CCS approach (Bartlett & Vavrus, 2014, 2017; Vavrus & Bartlett, 2009) to examine PCS programs at two universities. Amani University is one of the largest private, religiously affiliated universities in the country, and Umoja University is a large, prestigious public (secular) university.1 Drawing on the CCS approach, I first engaged in a horizontal comparison between campus life and initiatives for peace through PCS programs at these two institutions. The vertical comparison then considered university-level conceptions of peace (among faculty, administrators, and students) in relation to those of national policymakers, and how these views were shaped by international actors who were supporting the two programs. The transversal axis traced the history of conflict and peace in Kenya, the intersection of university and national peacebuilding processes, and the emergence of PCS programs in Kenyan universities, specifically at the two focal universities. While the two institutions had very different missions and organizational structures, findings show similarities in faculty approaches to the design and teaching of peace in the two PCS programs. I argue that these similarities are a result of the Kenyan peace knowledge (discussed below) shared by faculty at both institutions that shaped how they developed and implemented PCS in very similar ways. In the next section, I provide a brief discussion of the scholarship on higher education and peacebuilding. This is followed by a description of the study design using the CCS approach. I then discuss one major finding from the study while reflecting on what this approach enabled me to achieve and understand, both theoretically and practically, in terms of research design, data analysis, and findings. The fourth and final section concludes the chapter with a reflection on challenges I encountered with the study and how I navigated them. This section gives insights into some theoretical and practical implications regarding the trade-offs between specificity and generalizability or transferability in comparative case study research.

Higher Education and Peacebuilding: A Literature Review Prior studies on education and peacebuilding identify education as both a driver of conflict and a platform for peace (Bush & Saltarelli, 2000; Davies, 2004, 2005; Harber, 2004, King, 2014, Galtung, 2008). Most research on higher education and peacebuilding link universities with the development of democracy and political stability before, during, and after conflict (Buckland, 2005; Heyneman et al., 2007; Kamen, 1988; Murdoch & Sandler, 2004). Scholars suggest that higher education curricula can help to develop a democratic citizenry and prepare a workforce necessary for the post-conflict phase

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after acute violence has dissipated. Other researchers suggest that access to higher education may increase job opportunities and make participation in armed conflict less desirable (Collier et al., 2003, 2004). This view is supported by Glaeser et al.’s (2006) research on education and democracy, which shows that a high level of schooling inculcates virtues of democratic political action, an improvement of interpersonal skills that enhance civic involvement, and better decision-making skills among students. Heyneman et al. (2007) further argued that HEIs are instrumental in the development of a rational and self-critical society in which the sense of shared citizenship overcomes differences based on race, religion, and ethnic identities, hence contributing to national peace and reconciliation. Recent studies in Kenya also revealed that uneducated and unemployed youth were more likely to participate in violence and organized crime than those with higher education training and stable employment (Aluoka, 2016; Owino, 2013). Scholars who share the positive view of higher education and peacebuilding propose equitable, non-discriminatory access to quality higher education in periods after conflict (Collier et al., 2003; Dupuy, 2008; Kamen, 1988). For them, educational reconstruction as a means to peacebuilding can address inequality in education access and bias in the curriculum, such as ethnic misrepresentations that can contribute to civil war (Dupuy, 2008; Thyne, 2006; Woods, 2002). Although including higher education reforms in peace agreements does not guarantee their implementation, Dupuy (2008) argued that the failure of post-conflict regimes to honor such reforms contributes to conflict because an inadequate system of education can become a major grievance contributing to civil war. However, other studies on education and peacebuilding suggest that greater access to higher education does not inevitably result in the inculcation of peaceful perspectives and positive social change (Krueger & Maleckova, 2003). For instance, studies on higher education management in Kenya concluded that nepotism and ethnic favoritism in higher education management and recruitment created tensions among ethnic groups in the country (Chege, 2009; Munene, 2012). A similar study by Wiese and Jordaan (2010) revealed that ethnicity played a role in the selection criteria for higher education in South Africa during the apartheid regime, thereby exacerbating structural violence and ethnic tensions. Other scholars suggest that, in addition to non-discriminatory access to higher education, pedagogy is central to educational approaches to peacebuilding (Bajaj, 2015; Diaz-Soto, 2005; Giroux, 1988 ). These scholars maintain that critical approaches to teaching in peace education programs can increase learners’ awareness of their dispositions to peace and conflict and guide actions that can disrupt structures and cultures that foment conflict (Bajaj, 2015). However, this view assumes that faculty are committed to the promotion of peace when, in fact, this is not always the case. Indeed, given the prevalence of market-driven education and the orientation towards profit maximization among higher education institutions, faculty are not incentivized to focus on

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quality teaching, research, and service to communities, which includes their roles in peacebuilding (Oanda et al., 2008). In instances where faculty are part of peace and conflict programs, it is especially important to examine how they construct notions of peace to help illuminate higher education institutions as potential spaces for peacebuilding. Yet little is known about the actual implementation of peace and conflict studies programs, especially in Sub-Saharan Africa, and how they address challenges of violence and inter-ethnic conflicts. This study sought to help fill this void through a CCS of two Kenyan universities with PCS program, one of which was longstanding and the other which began in the aftermath of the post-election violence in 2007–08, when more than 1,100 people were killed and over 350,000 were internally displaced (Kriegler & Waki, 2009).

Theoretical and Conceptual Framework The study uses Wisler’s (2010) concept of peace knowledge to examine how faculty understandings of peace, their tacit knowledge and lived experiences of peace and conflict, shape their approaches to the design of university-level peace education curriculum, as well as their instructional methodologies in these courses. Wisler (2010) defined peace knowledge as “a region’s own way of knowing and living necessary for its own creation and sustainability of a culture of peace” (p. 15). Peace knowledge was an important analytical tool for this study because the proliferation of peace and conflict studies programs within universities in Kenya portray higher education institutions as spaces to foster conflict transformation, and more importantly, faculty in these programs assume the identity of transformative educators (Johnson, 2013; Ndura‐Ouédraogo, 2009). Since peace education programs aim to inculcate agency, action, knowledge, and skills necessary for the generation of structures that can enhance sustainable peace and justice, faculty in these programs are pillars for conceptualizing and designing courses that are supposed to help their universities attain such goals. Put differently, faculty as transformative actors are expected to challenge barriers to peace at the personal, relational, cultural, and structural levels, thereby resulting in conflict transformation. Such transformation has been defined as “constructive change processes that reduce violence, increase justice in direct interaction and social structures, and respond to real-life problems in human relationships” (Lederach, 2003, p. 14). The concept of peace knowledge enabled me to pay attention to the ways that faculty utilized their lived experiences and designed and taught in peace and conflict studies program in ways that portray the local wisdom, knowledge, and aspirations of peace in the hopes of transforming conflict and sustaining peace.

Research Design and Methodology The study utilized the comparative case study to examine peace and conflict studies programs at two Kenyan universities: Amani University and Umoja

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University. These institutions were selected based on preliminary fieldwork that established them among the pioneers of university-level peace and conflict programs in Kenya and East Africa. Moreover, the institutions’ divergence in their missions, size, student profiles, and campus life informed their selection. For instance, Amani University, a religiously affiliated institution with 6,000 students and over 100 faculty as of 2015, established its PCS program in the late 1988. This university seeks to advance scholarship that impacts the world in ways that embody its Christian worldview. Amani University’s philosophical orientation to religion and social justice informed their creation of specialized trainings for the congregations, church leaders, and youth groups in matters of faith and peace. Similarly, its PCS programs were central to its mission of preparing morally upright leaders for the church and society. Moreover, faculty at Amani, who were mostly ordained church ministers, viewed their participation in peace studies as a vocation towards restoring peace and social justice. In contrast, Umoja is a large, public university with approximately 90,000 students and over 1,500 teaching faculty (Oanda et al., 2008). The PCS program at Umoja began after the post-election violence in 2008. As discussed below, its PCS program was not central to the institution’s mission because Umoja, being public and secular institution, worked to meet the national goals of higher education, such as meeting labor market demands, though this did include the need for peace educators in secondary schools and experts in peace and security. The student body mostly consisted of undergraduate students. Thus, Umoja University represents a contemporary neoliberal university in Kenya, where its management and policies are shaped largely by forces relating to financing, the high demand for post-secondary education, and the mandate of addressing national development goals. The CCS approach seeks to elucidate relationships at the “macro, meso, and micro levels, or scales” (Bartlett & Vavrus, 2014, p. 131) by offering multiple levels of analysis as a means of stretching the “bounded” case to include the horizontal, vertical, and transversal axes. Although the larger study from which this chapter emerged traced the history of PCS in Kenya (transversal axis) and vertical relationships between the universities and institutions in Europe and the United States, this chapter focuses on the horizontal comparison of two homologous entities, Amani and Umoja universities and their PCS programs (Bartlett & Vavrus, 2017). The CCS approach allowed me to pay attention to the comparison of two institutions that were similar by virtue of their PCS offerings but very different in terms of the centrality of the PCS programs to their mission. Through this research, I found that there were multiple and divergent institutional rationales for engaging in PCS programs, but also similarities in faculty commitments, understandings, and approaches to peacebuilding through education. The study involved a year of fieldwork at these two institutions during which time I compiled data from multiple sources. First, I conducted 63 semi-structured interviews with students, faculty, university

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administrators, and national officials. Interviewees were purposefully selected based on their roles in each university’s curriculum implementation or national peace processes. The second source of data came in the form of participant observation, including classroom observations in peace lessons and observations in students’ on-campus life, out-of-school events, and community outreach initiatives. During classes, I looked at what faculty taught (including their application of peace knowledge) and how they taught their content. I conducted follow-up interviews with the faculty to gain explanations after these classes about why they structured the classes in particular ways. Finally, I reviewed and analyzed national policy documents on peace education, syllabi of PCS programs, newspaper articles, and institutional mission statements of the two focal peace studies programs to complement these other methods. The document review included two class syllabi at Amani and Umoja, and I also had an interview with the faculty about the syllabus and about national policy documents on peace education in Kenya, particularly the Sector-Wide Peace Education Policy (2008–2014). For newspapers, I examined content on higher education and peace during my fieldwork, such as news about student unrest, violence, politics, and terrorist attacks on Kenyan universities (Lubanga, 2016). Finally, I reviewed the Amani and Umoja mission statements to understand underlying rationales and philosophies for their engagements in peace studies programs. In my document reviews, I traced contextual references, frequency, and meanings of concepts such as peace and their relation to education and peacebuilding processes. For instance, I searched for words such as peace, peace education, conflict, culture, ethnicity, dialogue, education, universities, teaching, violence, riot, strike, Amani, cohesion, higher education, and teaching. Study findings discussed in the next section mainly draw on data from faculty interviews and from a few of the student interviews.

Localizing Peace and Conflict Education Curriculum in Kenyan Universities This research revealed that there were far more similarities between the PCS programs at the two universities than I had anticipated, given their very different missions and structures. In this section, I illustrate three of the similarities I found among faculty at the two institutions. They include contextual legitimacy of the PCS programs, commitment to students’ practical experiences, and homogeneous views and emphasis on Africa and African culture. I argue these similarities result from the Kenyan peace knowledge shared by faculty at both institutions. The first commonality among the faculty at Amani and Umoja relates to their awareness of contextual legitimacy, or the relevance of the peace and conflict curriculum specifically to Kenya. This was a common theme that guided faculty in designing PCS curriculum. Faculty believed that for their programs to contribute to conflict transformation, the curriculum needed to

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reflect local experiences, realities, and understandings of peace and conflict. Some faculty members suggested a peace curriculum that was “local” needed to include an “African worldview” of peace and conflict. Most of the faculty explained to me that conflict in Kenya may have similarities to conflict in other regions, but, generally, the challenges are unique, which makes it difficult to use global peace education curricula. For these scholars, a local curriculum for peace in Kenya needed to consider themes of colonialism, negative ethnic relations, and resource conflict. This is tied to the Kenyan context, where tense ethnic relations stem from unjust (post)-colonial histories and policies of landownership, nepotism, and political marginalization of minority ethnic groups in national leadership (Adar, 1998). In light of this thinking, faculty involved in the design of the PCS curriculum at both institutions proposed mandatory coursework that had a strong African focus to it. For instance, both Amani and Umoja developed courses entitled African Culture and Peacebuilding and African Philosophy. At Amani, they also taught Land Conflict in Africa; at Umoja, they developed a course entitled Traditional (African) Approaches to Peace and Reconciliation and Ethnicity and Armed Conflict. In addition, at Amani University, students were required to write final papers that mainly focused on peacebuilding issues in Sub-Saharan Africa. This intentional focus on regional understandings of peace and conflict exemplifies faculty application of local knowledge to make the curriculum relevant. Faculty discussed the importance of contextual legitimacy in our interviews as the following quotes indicate, with specific references to Kenyan/African knowledge in italics (here and in the rest of this section): Dialogue and reconciliation are very much emphasized in the African culture and African approach to doing things. We go to our neighbor to discuss and talk about our issues and challenges; we don’t spill it out there. In fact, the courts of law are very recent, but African approach has always been talk, converse, address these issues, and that’s why the current approach for example, the ICC [International Criminal Court] in Kenya, or Sudan, has failed, because you see President Bashir from Sudan is on the warrant of arrest, if he comes to Kenya or South Africa, the court asks that we arrest him. But these guys have their own approach to these issues, and they are going to tell you, “well we can talk about it, we won’t arrest this guy.” This is a different cultural approach of looking at things. Dialogue and reconciliation processes in Africa are the pillars to conflict management. (Faculty member, Amani University) African cultures prioritize the relationship between an individual within the community, more than how the state apparatus might function to aid coexistence. Our first-year students go through a course of African Culture and Peacebuilding. Some of them will be hearing about these cultural

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Maurice Sikenyi values for the first time, even from their own ethnic groups. What helps us is the diverse groups, from ethnicity, nationality, age, gender. We always get a range of students, I mean, the oldest guy is 57, so he can retrace back on cultural practices that happened after conflict awhile when he was a young boy and now 57 years later; and the young fellow who is 25–26 realizes some cultural values that s/he needs to study. (Faculty member, Umoja University)

To make the curriculum relevant, faculty members at Amani and Umoja sought to advance local content and understandings in the PCS curricula by adapting universal peacebuilding frameworks and adding information about politics and cultural practices. Moreover, at both institutions, they utilized local experts and resources as well as students’ lived experiences in teaching and learning about peace and conflict. For example, the PCS program at Umoja University was developed through a partnership with a university in a European country. The external partners assisted by training some local faculty, providing sample peace curricula, and creating partnerships for exchange programs for students. Kenyan faculty stated that they adopted some of the course materials that had been developed by the partners, but they tailored them within the contexts of Kenya and, broadly, in relation to Sub-Saharan Africa. For example, in a course titled Ethics of War and Peace, the instructor at Umoja asserted: While it’s important to teach RtP— [Right to Protect] the United Nation’s views on what elements [that] constitute the right for another country to invade another during an internal or external war, it’s also important to incorporate cross-border conflict and resource conflict in Africa so that students would reflect on the processes involved in national interventions for such conflict, such as the cases of Congo and Central Republic of Africa. We are also trying to get them [students] to reflect on the current situation, the contextual issues in Kenya and within the continent. And we tell all our lecturers to do that. So, the class assignments are meant to give them [students] some local application of what they have learnt. For example, in my class Ethics of War and Peacebuilding, they have to do the paper. In all their analyses, they have to look at the African context; how do we apply some of these perspectives of Ethics of War and Peace Building in analyzing humanitarian intervention, ICC, whatever…into the African context? And that really gives them the advantage of reflecting within their own situation. Number 2, the model that we use here is to get the student to reflect on the readings that they have received and engage with the context. We always begin our classes by review of the region, just like perhaps within the U.S. too, when you read this text, what did it tell you and then how is all this relevant to our context today? Another faculty member indicated a similar commitment to contextual relevance in the PCS curriculum by highlighting the importance of teaching

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about conflict that requires local knowledge, such as the practice of cattle rustling. This is the forceful raiding of livestock from one community by another using crude weapons and guns, which, in Kenya, has destroyed property and lives among the Pokot and Turkana pastoral communities. The faculty member suggested that cattle rustling practices are best solved by “understanding the origins of the practice, the traditions that sustain the practice, and the networks of people benefiting from that practice.” According to this person, students need to understand cattle rustling as a local and “culturally” embedded conflict with Kenya’s pastoral communities to imagine a locally viable solution. These views were also shared by faculty (and the Chair) of the Peace Center at Umoja University, who suggested that training students in “African cultures and peacebuilding can develop students’ understanding of the practice of dialogue, reconciliation, and reparation with the various traditional societies in Africa.” A second finding across the two universities relates to faculty members’ shared commitment to student engagement through practical activities in partnership with communities affected by conflict. Faculty at both institutions argued that students sharpen their practical skills and deepen their knowledge of the systemic, structural, and cultural issues that generate conflict when they are engaged in practical, community-based activities. For example, Amani University students engaged in community outreach programs among the Pokot and Turkana communities to understand small arms proliferation and conflict in the pastoralist communities. Similarly, some students at Umoja University participated in immersion programs with security forces to support resettlement of internally displaced persons. Although this hands-on approach to learning is not a preserve of the field of peace studies, the transformative outcomes of these practical experiences were noted by faculty and students alike. Students in both institutions expressed that their programs generated in them what they called “kufanya kitu kwa sababu ya amani” [“the desire to do something for peace”]. The desire to engage in actions for peace denoted a shift in perspectives, attitudes, and behavior regarding conflict and peace among many students. For example, one student at Umoja University expressed the following: I joined this course [PCS program] because I had low aggregate points. All along, I wanted to study law at [Umoja University], but I would have needed to do that as a parallel student [self-sponsored, without a government scholarship]. Now I think I am in the right place. In the last three years, I have learned a lot about this country and conflict in general. I had an internship in my home county [district of administration in Kenya] working to support the environmental conservation projects that were started by the governor. I also helped form some peace clubs in my former secondary school. I am now in my final year writing my project on the human wildlife conflict in Taita-Taveta.

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The shared focus on students’ practical experiences through outreach programs was surprising because I anticipated such experiences at Amani University, given the explicit mission on peace and community engagement, but I did not expect it at Umoja University, a neoliberal and cash-strapped institution. Yet faculty at the two institutions viewed practical experiences as a critical element of student’s lived experiences of conflict and peace, a practice they considered central in the understanding of the factors and structures that drive conflict. During practical engagements, students were required to explore general conflict cycles and locate their positionality and agency within the various stages of conflict. These faculty approaches dovetailed with Wisler’s (2010) research that supports the utilization of lived experiences of peace and conflict as an essential part of knowledge that can be utilized to sustain, and transform, communities facing conflict. The attention to context, practical knowledge, and the incorporation of learners’ knowledge is another example of faculty utilization of peace knowledge in PCS classes at both universities. Third, faculty approaches to peace curriculum and classroom practice at both universities revealed a homogeneous view of Africa and African culture in relation to peacebuilding. This is problematic given the diversity of cultural practices within Africa and among people of African descent. By presenting the cultural processes of African peoples as singular, faculty limited their ability to explore the differing dynamics and interpretations of cultures that reproduce oppression and can lead to violence. Thus, the faculty at both institutions tended to highlight similarities even when there were clear differences regarding the national narrative of each African state and their intra- and inter-conflict and security dynamics (Khadiagala, 2006). For example, course titles and syllabus had themes on “African culture and peacebuilding,” and faculty often applied the term “African culture” to all African countries, as in this instructor’s comment that “dialogue and reconciliation are very much emphasized in the African culture.” Despite the tendency for PCS faculty to speak of “an African culture” as a single, bounded unit, they would frequently refer to some ethnic groups on the continent as primordially distinct and similarly bounded. Returning to the cattle rustling example, one faculty member described the Pokot and Turkana as more hostile and conflictual ethnic groups than those they considered more “modern,” such as the ethnic groups of those of top national political figures. Thus, while faculty at Amani and Umoja both focused on how cultural processes relate to peace and conflict to help students contextualize them in Kenya, there were at other times a magnification of perceived differences in cultural beliefs and practices to explain conflictual relationships between certain ethnic groups. In sum, the findings shared in this chapter reveal that peace knowledge is a useful concept for examining context, peace, and conflict. Analysis of Kenyan faculty members’ local knowledge of peace reveals how their ways of knowing emerge from their lived experiences more than from their institutional homes,

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as the peace knowledge expressed and demonstrated by Amani and Umoja faculty was surprisingly similar. Similarly, faculty instructional approaches aimed at capturing the “local” dynamics of conflict, and they adapted ideas and materials from international institutions to make them relevant to the Kenyan context. Although local knowledge is not rigidly bounded geographically, it does reflect concerns of a territorial nature. For example, land conflicts that relate to grazing rights between members of different ethnic groups and pastoralist communities in Kenya reflect specific colonial and postcolonial histories that have made certain social distinctions more salient in the present era. In essence, these findings suggest that the common lived experiences among faculty, before and during conflict, shape their peace knowledge and how they apply it in the PCS programs far more than do influences related to institutional or departmental missions, size, or the guiding philosophies of different institutions.

Reflections on Opportunities and Challenges of the CCS Approach Bartlett and Vavrus (2014) have argued that sites of study are not autonomous because they are influenced by actions far beyond the “local context and current moments” (p. 13). Moreover, they contend that context is influenced by various actors and events over time, “in different locations and at different scales” (p. 19). The CCS approach enabled me to examine two cases not as bounded units, but rather as locations where PCS programs have emerged within a similar sociopolitical context. My emphasis on the horizontal axis, however, did not preclude me from considering the vertical and transversal axes as well because it is clear from the analysis that historical, cultural, social, and political forces—both internal and external—shaped these two cases. Specifically, the CCS approach enabled me to examine the two universities and their PCS programs along the horizontal axis and to find similarities in the faculty members’ views and practices that I had not anticipated. Although there were examples in the data showing how their institutional missions (such as religious foundations) shaped their organizations and approaches to PCS, there were far more similarities than expected. This was particularly surprising because, as the vertical axis revealed, Amani and Umoja had different international partners working with faculty on program development that could have led to strikingly different meanings of peace and peace-related curricula, but it did not. Similarly, the transversal axis, which forms a key part of the larger study, was critical in my analysis of the similarities in faculty members’ peace knowledge as it reflects their common engagement with colonial and post-colonial histories of conflict and peace in Kenya and Sub-Saharan Africa (Omeje, 2015). One challenge of utilizing the CCS approach that I encountered was how to discuss the commonalities across the two universities in a way that did not generalize the findings for the entire country or continent. Transferability, the term preferred by many qualitative researchers (Lincoln & Guba, 1985), means

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that one seeks to draw some broader conclusions from rich sources of data without overstating the findings or homogenizing the identity of research participants. For example, in the larger study, I provide examples of how administrators’ views on peace and peacebuilding through PCS programs varied owing to differences in mission, organization, and size of the two institutions. Nevertheless, my primary focus in this chapter was on faculty members’ approaches to teaching and course/program design, and this is where I found striking similarities. I characterized what I found as “local views of peace,” “local approaches to teaching about peace and conflict,” and “Kenyan perspectives on HEIs and peacebuilding.” However, I also sought to resist this tendency to generalize by demonstrating the multi-faceted processes, understandings, and manifestations of peace and the enactment of peacebuilding in the PCS programs that were similar but not identical to each other. By paying attention to the horizontal, vertical, and transversal axes while remaining focused on the first of them, I believe I was able to overcome this challenge.

Concluding Thoughts This chapter shared findings from a study of two Kenyan universities and their peace and conflict studies programs with a focus on how faculty members’ peace knowledge affects curriculum and course design as well as their pedagogy. I showed how these aspects of their work reflected some international principles and programs but were continuously adapted to mesh with local realities of peace and conflict in the region. Although students were not the focus of this chapter, I provided some examples to support the conclusion that they found their experience in the programs transformative and that it ignited in them an agency for promoting peace. These findings draw attention to a local focus on peacebuilding theory and practice, which denotes a departure from externally directed and putatively universal approaches to peace education and peacebuilding. Moreover, the findings underscore the significance of context, particularly local communities and local people, including faculty and students, as some of the primary agents for peace in Kenya. As Ginty and Richmond (2013) argue, local voices and local agency are a part of an empowering process in peacebuilding because these local actors possess lived experiences and tacit knowledge of peace that matter for long-term peacebuilding. Although the focus on local actors in peacebuilding often ignores power struggles about whose voices count or are silenced in the constitution of local views of conflict and peace, this study reveals that peace knowledge is a significant conceptual and analytical tool in examining higher education and peacebuilding. Examining the linkages between higher education and peacebuilding calls for attention to multiple forces, including those outside of learning institutions that shape the curriculum, students’ lives, and faculty/student relationships. This entails tracing the historical events and institutional missions that shape university culture and programming. The CCS approach enabled

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me to examine the diverse understandings and approaches to teaching peace at two distinct higher education institutions and offered a robust way to explore the complex process of teaching peace. Although these findings are not transferable to all universities on the continent with PCS programs, I believe the concept of peace knowledge is one that allows researchers to make some broad statements from the specific cases they study. The findings of this study suggest the need for educational researchers and practitioners to consider how educational theories, practices, programs, and policies reflect local knowledge and wisdom along with the national and international forces that affect PCS programs, and peace and conflict in the first place. Integrating local knowledge and aspirations for peace in educational curriculum and policies is critical for building peace through education.

Discussion Questions 1

2

3

Sikenyi’s research on peace and conflict studies (PCS) programs at two distinctly different Kenyan universities suggests the local knowledge about peace—peace knowledge—may be more important than institutional differences in explaining the shape of the curriculum, pedagogy, and program objectives. How does he use the phenomenon of peace knowledge as an analytical tool in his horizontal and vertical comparison? Although Sikenyi is generally positive in his assessment of the faculty members’ pedagogy at both institutions, he concludes with a critique of how they often spoke about Africa and “African culture” in a way that minimized differences across ethnic groups while, at other times, they magnified distinctions in cultural beliefs and practices to explain conflict between certain groups. What made this an important part of his analysis in terms of the horizontal, vertical, and transversal axes? In selecting a large, public university and a smaller, private, religiously affiliated one, Sikenyi anticipated that he would find more differences than similarities between these two institutions’ PCS programs. What do you think of his strategy to choose dissimilar cases given the focus of his research? If he had selected more similar universities and reached the same conclusion, how would this have affected the impact of his argument?

Note 1 The names of these two institutions and all study participants are pseudonyms used to protect anonymity.

References Adar, K. (1998). Ethnicity and ethnic kings: The enduring dual constraint in Kenya’s multi-ethnic democratic electoral experiment. Journal of the Third World Spectrum, 5(2), 71–96.

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Aluoka, O. (2016). The social foundations of state fragility in Kenya: Challenges of a growing democracy. In D. Olowu & P. Chanie (Eds.), State fragility and state building in Africa: Cases from Eastern and Southern Africa (pp. 21–38). Springer. Bajaj, M. (2015). Pedagogies of resistance and critical peace education praxis. Journal of Peace Education, 12(2), 154–166. Bartlett, L., & Vavrus, F. (2014). Transversing the vertical case study: A methodological approach to studies of education policy as practice. Anthropology & Education Quarterly, 45(2), 131–147. Bartlett, L., & Vavrus, F. (2017). Rethinking case study research: A comparative approach. Routledge. Bush, K., & Saltarelli, D. (2000). The two faces of education in ethnic conflict: Towards a peacebuilding education for children. United Nations Children’s Fund and Innocenti Research Centre. Chege, M. (2009). The politics of education in Kenyan universities: A call for a paradigm shift. African Studies Review, 52(3), 55–71. https://doi.org/10.1353/arw.0. 0231. Collier, P., Elliott, V., Hegre, H., Hoeffler, A., Reynal-Querol, M., & Sambanis, N. (2003). Breaking the conflict trap: Civil war and development policy. The World Bank Publications and Oxford University Press. Collier, P., & Hoeffler, A. (2004). Greed and grievance in civil war. Oxford Economic Papers, 56(4), 563–595. https://doi.org/10.1093/oep/gpf064. Davies, L. (2004). Education and conflict: Complexity and chaos. Routledge. Davies, L. (2005). Evaluating the link between conflict and education. Journal of Peacebuilding & Development, 2(2), 42–58. Diaz-Soto, L. (2005). How can we teach peace when we are so outraged? A call for critical peace education. Taboo: The Journal of Culture and Education, Fall-Winter, 91–96. Dupuy, K. (2008). Education in peace agreements,1989–2005. Conflict Resolution Quarterly, 26(2), 149–166. https://doi.org/10.1002/crq. Gainer, M. (2015). Planning transformation in a divided nation: Kenya vision 2030, 2005–2009. Princeton University Press. Galtung, J. (2008). Form and content in peace education. In M. Bajaj (Ed.), The Encyclopedia of Peace Education (Vol. 49–58). Information Age Publishing. Gettleman, J. (2015, April 2). Somali militants kill 147 at a Kenyan university. The New York Times. Ginty, R., & Richmond, O. (2013). The local turn in peacebuilding: A critical agenda for peace. Third World Quarterly, 34(5), 763–783. Giroux, H. (1988). Teachers as intellectuals: Toward a critical pedagogy of learning. Bergin & Garvey Publishers. Glaeser, E., Ponzento, G., & Shleifer, A. (2006). Why does democracy need education? National Bureau of Economic Research. Government of Kenya. (2008). Kenya vision 2030. Nairobi: Government of the Republic of Kenya. https://vision2030.go.ke/. Government of Kenya. (2015). Republic of Kenya, Ministry of Education, Science and Technology: National education sector plan 2013–2018. Government of Kenya. Harber, C. (2004). Schooling as violence. RoutledgeFalmer. Harris, G. (2010). Studying conflict, violence and peace in African universities. Higher Education, 59(3), 293–301. https://doi.org/10.2307/25622184.

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Harris, I. M., Fisk, L. J., & Rank, C. (1998). A portrait of university peace studies in North America and Western Europe at the end of the millennium. International Journal of Peace Studies, 3(1). https://www3.gmu.edu/programs/icar/ijps/vol3_1/Harris. htm?gmuw-rd=sm&gmuw-rdm=ht. Heyneman, S., Kraince, R., Lesko, N., & Bastedo, M. (2007). Higher education and social cohesion. In P. Altbach & P. Peterson (Eds.), Higher education in the new century: Global challenges and innovative ideas (pp. 55–78). Sense Publishers. Johnson, A. T. (2013). University agency in peacebuilding: Perspectives on conflict and development in Kenya. Prospects, 43(3), 329–345. https://doi.org/10.1007/ s11125-013-9276-8. Kamen, D. (1988). Education and democracy: A comparative institutional analysis. Sociology of Education, 61(2), 114–127. King, E. (2014). From classrooms to conflict in Rwanda. Cambridge University Press. Kriegler, J., & Waki, P. (2009). Kriegler and Waki report summarized version. http:// www.kas.de/wf/doc/kas_16094-1522-2-30.pdf. Krueger, A. B., & Maleckova, J. (2003). Education, poverty and terrorism: Is there a causal connection? Journal of Economic Perspectives, 14(4), 119–144. KTJN. (2013). Summary: Truth Justice and Reconciliation Commission. Transitional Justice Network. Lederach, J. P. (2003). Little book of conflict transformation: Clear articulation of the guiding principles by a pioneer in the field. Good Books. Lincoln, Y. S. & Guba, E. G. (1985). Naturalistic inquiry. Sage Publications. Lopez, G. (1985). A university peace studies curriculum for the 1990s. Journal of Peace Research, 22(2), 117–128. https://doi.org/10.1177/002234338502200203. Lubanga, D. (2016, March 1). Student leaders now involved in war on radicalisation. Daily Nation. http://www.nation.co.ke/counties/-/1107872/3098836/-/rwmxjj/-/index. html. MoEST. (2014). Education sector policy on peace education. Government of Kenya. Munene, I. I. (2012). Our university: Ethnicity, higher education and the quest for state legitimacy in Kenya. Higher Education Policy, 26(1), 43–63. https://doi.org/10. 1057/hep.2012.18. Murdoch, J., & Sandler, T. (2004). Civil wars and economic growth: Spatial dispersion. Journal of Political Science, 48(1), 138–151. Ndura‐Ouédraogo, E. (2009). The role of education in peace‐building in the African Great Lakes region: Educators’ perspectives. Journal of Peace Education, 6(1), 37–49. https://doi.org/10.1080/17400200802655130. Oanda, I., Chege, F., & Wesonga, D. (2008). Privatisation and private higher education in Kenya: Implications for access, equity and knowledge production. Codesria Book Series. Ombati, C. (2016, February 18). University of Nairobi student arrested on his way to Libya to join ISIS terror group. The Standard. http://www.standardmedia.co.ke/a rticle/2000192170/university-of-nairobi-student-arrested-on-his-way-to-libya-to-joinisis-terror-group. Omeje, K. (2015). Promoting peace and conflict-sensitive higher education in SubSaharan Africa, African Conflict and Peacebuilding Review, 5(2) 33–56. https://www. semanticscholar.org/. Owino, C. (2013). Socio-economic status of youth in Kenya: Implications for peaceful elections. In K. Njogu (Ed.), Youth and peaceful elections in Kenya (pp. 55–68). Twaweza Communications Limited.

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Sikenyi, M. (2019). Higher education and peacebuilding: A comparative case study of peace and conflict studies programs in Kenyan universities. (Doctoral dissertation, University of Minnesota). University of Minnesota Digital Conservancy. Thyne, C. (2006). ABC’s, 123’s, and the golden rule: The pacifying effect of education on civil war, 1980–1999. International Studies Quarterly, 50(4), 733–754. UNESCO. (1945). UNESCO: Building peace in the minds of men and women. UNESCO. Vavrus, F., & Bartlett, L. (Eds.). (2009). Critical approaches to comparative education: Vertical case studies from Africa, Europe, the Middle East, and the Americas. Palgrave Macmillan. Wiese, M., & Jordaan, Y. (2010). The role of ethnicity in the higher education institution selection process. South African Journal of Higher Education, 24(4), 538–554. Wisler, A. K. (2010). Portraits of peace knowledge in post-Yugoslav higher education. Journal of Peace Education, 7(1), 15–31. https://doi.org/10.1080/17400200903370886. Woods, D. (2002). Overcoming apartheid in South African universities: Differential access and excellence. In F. K. Alexander & K. Alexander (Eds.), The university: International expectation (pp. 61–68). McGill-Queen’s University Press.

Section III

Enabling Processual Analysis across Sites and Scales

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Comparison as Analysis, Interview Technique, and Relational Ethic Findings and Reflections from a Study on the International Baccalaureate in Ecuador Tiago Bittencourt

Introduction The International Baccalaureate (IB) is an educational foundation established in 1968 in Geneva, Switzerland. The foundation first emerged in response to a growing demand by an internationally mobile student population for a high school diploma that had currency across multiple higher education settings, particularly in North America and Europe. During its early years, the IB was a niche program catering to fee-paying international school students in the last two years of their high school education. The IB has since expanded and now consists of four education programs available to students aged 3–19: the Primary Years Programme for students aged 3–12; the Middle Years Programme for students aged 11–16; the pre-university Diploma Programme (DP) for students aged 16–19; and the Career-Related Programme, also for students aged 16–19. While distinct in structure and emphasis, all four programs are philosophically aligned and abide by the foundation’s stated mission of “develop[ing] inquiring, knowledgeable and caring young people who help to create a better and more peaceful world through intercultural understanding and respect” (IBO, 2021). Since its inception, the IB has been critiqued for its disproportionate presence in elite spaces and its Eurocentric curriculum that is derived from a “western humanist tradition” (van Oord, 2007, p. 376). To diffuse these critiques, the IB has made a deliberate effort to incorporate public schools into its network, with a special focus on expanding into the Global South. To a certain extent, these efforts have been successful, where 41% of the IB’s 5,562 member schools are now publicly funded (IBO, 2021). However, closer scrutiny reveals important geographic disparities and highlights the IB’s continual struggle to make headway in public schools in the Global South. For instance, nearly three-fourths of all public schools currently offering the IB are in the United States and Canada (IBO, 2021). As Bunnell (2016) argues, the lack of geographic diversity, especially in its public offerings, presents an important challenge to the foundation’s claim of being “international.” An important breakthrough occurred in 2012, when Ecuador signed an agreement that aimed to gradually introduce the DP into the country’s DOI: 10.4324/9781003216551-6

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approximately 1,400 public secondary schools. Signed by former president Rafael Correa, the stated goal was for the IB to be available in 500 public schools by 2017, and the rest thereafter (Barnett et al., 2013). The agreement generated considerable enthusiasm within the IB Secretariat, which offered added support through its regional offices and provided concessions to Ecuadorian public schools failing to meet the prerequisites for accreditation. The hope was that the Ecuadorian agreement could serve as a policy model for other countries to replicate and thus aid the foundation in its effort to achieve greater geographic balance. In Ecuador, the decision to introduce an education program with historic associations to “eliteness” and “Eurocentrism” was highly contentious. Numerous civil societies, including the country’s teachers’ union, released public statements decrying the agreement, claiming that it served to impose “foreign cultures and ideologies via education” (Resnik, 2014, p. 105). Moreover, these critiques questioned the role and purpose of the agreement in achieving President Correa’s stated goal of promoting a radical new paradigm for development inspired on the “politico-intellectual reflections on development by marginalized indigenous subjects” (Radcliffe, 2012, p. 241). Rather than enable a shift in development thinking, critics believed the agreement reiterated the epistemic and social hierarchies that allowed systems of marginalization to emerge in the first place. As Ball (1998) reminds us, policy deliberations and their subsequent implementation are always inflected by a complex “process of influence, text production, dissemination and, ultimately, re-creation in contexts of practice” (p. 126). Indicating that while a policy such as the IB agreement may be associated with notions that privilege the histories and lived experiences of elites residing in the Global North, it can be harnessed to serve alternative ends. Drawing on the comparative case study (CCS) approach, I conducted a study that was originally interested in the “process of appropriation” and intent on examining the different ways actors across sites and scales interpret, experience, and leverage the IB to fulfill distinct purposes. Abiding by what Bartlett and Vavrus (2017) refer to as processual approach, I employed an iterative and emergent research design aimed at responding to serendipitous findings while better addressing participants’ own interests and insights. My goal in this chapter is to detail my engagement with a processual approach to inquiry by highlighting the movements and adjustments that occurred during the research project. I will focus on specific moments that opened new pathways for inquiry, while providing the reasoning that undergirded my methodological response. I will discuss how these formative moments were enabled by a personal commitment to a relational approach to comparison (see Sobe, 2018) that strived to invite and include participants into the comparative process. Drawing on these reflections, I will reiterate Tom’s (1996) argument that an emergent and iterative research design is a prerequisite for researchers committed to facilitating greater collaboration between researcher and participants. I will conclude by asking readers interested in

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comparative case studies to consider the benefits and opportunities of a relational approach that views comparison as a method of co-creation rather than a mode of analysis that strictly occurs at the end of the study, when findings from different sites and scales are stabilized, isolated, and eventually juxtaposed. For clarity, I will begin by providing an overview of the historical antecedence of the IB policy agreement, paying special attention to the discursive tensions between the Correa administration’s platform and the values and connotation often associated to the IB. This will be followed by a brief discussion of how the IB agreement largely cohered with an important discursive shift in Correa’s political rhetoric that increasingly framed redistribution as a necessary precursor for a new social order based on an alternative vision of development. The chapter’s focus, however, will be on my use of homologous comparison to examine students’ experiences with the IB in two socially dissimilar schools.

Education Reform under Correa: New Visions or Old Habits? In the 1990s, a cascading series of events that included plunging oil prices, political instability, and a liberalized financial system with limited regulatory power triggered a severe financial crisis that had devastating effects on Ecuador’s economy. The crisis was most acute in 1999, a year in which unemployment reached 15%, and poverty rates skyrocketed to 40% (Jokisch & Pribilsky, 2002). To lessen the strain of the financial crisis, the Ecuadorian government implemented several economic reforms. This included sharp cutbacks on social spending, especially in health and education. For instance, while in 1981 government spending on education was 5.4% of GDP, by 2000 it had decreased to 1.8% (Isch, 2011). Austerity measures had disastrous effects on public schooling. During the financial crisis and its immediate aftermath, Ecuadorian public education was severely underfunded and provided an unorganized supply of education with no common core curriculum. Baxter (2016) argues that there was no evidence that Ecuadorian education consisted of a “system per se, but [rather] somewhat isolated schools and actors doing whatever they could or wanted” (p. 155). The disarray in public schools was reflected in students’ consistently low standardized test scores, where Ecuador was routinely one of lowest performing in Latin American (Schneider et al., 2019). Moreover, the precarious conditions of Ecuadorian public schools generated a sharp demand for private education, especially among urban middle-class families. By 2005, nearly a third of all secondary school students attended private institutions (World Bank, 2017). The exodus of middle-class students from public institutions compelled Tamayo (2014) to conclude that during the financial crisis and its immediate aftermath, Ecuadorian public schools were “politically orphaned” and provided “low quality education to the poor” (p. 13). The financial crisis greatly diminished the public’s trust in government (Larrea Oña, 2007). This profound lack of confidence created room for new

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political actors to emerge. This was true in 2006, when Rafael Correa entered the presidential race as an “outsider, with no previous experience in electoral politics” (Conaghan & de la Torre, 2008, p. 271). Attuned to the prevalent feelings of political alienation, Correa campaigned as the self-proclaimed leader of a citizen’s revolution, promising an uncompromising commitment to the poor, even if this required compromising Ecuador’s standing within the international community (Tibocha & Jassir, 2008). Correa’s platform resonated, leading to his presidential election with 57% of the popular vote (EUEOM, 2009). Once elected, Correa and members of the country’s Constituent Assembly proposed a new constitution based on an alternative approach to development that drew on the social, political, and epistemic agency of Indigenous movements in the Andean region. Through the concept of Sumak Kawsay (Kichwa for “good living”), the Constitution’s focal aim was to collectively construct a new equilibrium that included “quality of life, democratization of the State, and attention to biocentric concerns” (Walsh, 2010, p. 18). Furthermore, it explicitly aimed to address the material and representational forms of inequality that were framed within the Constitution as being colonially produced and exacerbated by neoliberal policies. To this end, the new Constitution promoted “redistribution” and “plurinationalism” as two of its foundational principles. Redistribution aimed to address not only the high level of material inequality, but also Ecuador´s historical urban bias. Plurinationalism, on the other hand, sought to transform the state to overcome Ecuador’s “monocultural national identity premised upon European norms” (Radcliffe, 2012, p. 244). It is important to note that plurinationalism opposes the flattening effects of neoliberal multiculturalism that strives to include historically marginalized groups into existing structural arrangements. Rather, it stresses the need to examine the conditions and techniques of power that marginalize, racialize, and discriminate. The goal was to recognize the cultural wisdom of Ecuador’s diverse populations by destabilizing the dominion of Western logics as the only valid epistemological approach (see Walsh, 2009). The new Constitution considered education foundational for both redistribution and plurinationalism. As articulated in Article 26, education is “a priority area for public policymaking and state investment, the guarantee of equality and social inclusion and the indispensable condition for the good way of living [Sumak Kawsay].” Buoyed by popular support and ample financial resources due to increasing commodity prices, Correa was able to introduce the Ley Orgánica de Educacíon Intercultural (LOEI) [Organic Law of Intercultural Education], an ambitious reform package organized under three main pillars. The first strived to re-establish the state’s control over public education through a new decentralized education management model. The second focused on universalizing school access by stimulating school construction and eliminating all school fees. The third aimed at improving quality by enhancing pre-service teacher training and creating a new national

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curriculum that was interdisciplinary in approach and emphasized a rightsbased approach to education. According to article EE of the LOEI, this new national curriculum was “guided by a coherent vision of learning that recognizes the specificities of our diverse, plurinational and intercultural society” (Ministerio de Educación, 2011, p. 14). In addition to reform measures, Correa’s administration sought to expand several existing education policies. This included broadening a small-scale initiative signed by his presidential predecessor that piloted the DP in 17 public schools. Under the Compromiso Presidencial [Presidential Commitment] No. 17270 signed in 2012, Correa declared the IB a tema emblemático [emblematic topic] of his administration, promising to expand the initiative into as many public schools as possible. For many, the decision to scale-up the initiative was confounding, as the IB has long been associated with values and ideals that directly oppose the social and epistemic egalitarianism central to Correa’s state project. For instance, the IB has been critiqued not only for its close association with neoliberal school choice policies (Yemini & Dvir, 2016), but also for its claims of being international while purporting an approach that is, epistemologically, thoroughly “western” (van Oord, 2007). Aware of these critiques, numerous civil society organizations published statements expressing concern that the scaling-up of the IB could reinforce and further ingrain the representational inequalities that the government had vehemently claimed to combat (Becker, 2012). “Los pelucones”: Redistribution and Class Belligerence While seemingly incongruent with a state project aimed at undoing racial and epistemic hierarchies, the scaling up of the IB largely cohered with an important discursive shift in Correa’s political rhetoric. Lind (2012) describes this shift as part of Correa’s growing emphasis on the importance of redistribution, a principle argued as being a necessary precursor for the creation of a new social order. To justify and mobilized public opinion in favor of redistribution, class belligerence became a focal and organizing feature in Correa’s political discourse, where Ecuadorian society was routinely portrayed as being the byproduct of a sharp social divide between an affluent minority and a historically marginalized majority. Indeed, Correa often employed derogatory terminology, characterizing the affluent minority as being ignorant, incompetent, and completely disconnected from the cultural and material realities of most of the population. This was evident in political speeches and public appearances where Correa routinely referred to elites as pelucones, or powdered wigs, in reference to their landed wealth, European descent, and disassociation with the values and best interests of the country. As Mignolo and Walsh (2018) contend, an overt emphasis on redistribution allowed the promise of an alternative approach to development to lose its “meaning, application and force” (p. 68). Aligned with the principle of redistribution, Correa’s administration framed the IB as fulfilling two related purposes. First, it was an effective

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means of improving the overall quality of Ecuador’s low-performing public education system through the IB’s ready-made curriculum, teacher training programs, and external assessments. The belief was that through a process of “percolation” (Resnik, 2012), the curricular and pedagogical approaches central to the IB would eventually seep into all classrooms, including those not offering the program. Second, the IB was presented as a direct challenge to local elites who have long used private schools, international curricula, second-language acquisition, and higher education abroad to reproduce their status (Martínez & de la Torre, 2010). By appropriating an important technique of elite differentiation, Correa’s administration strived to establish a sense of equivalency between public and private schools, where private schools could operate as sites of cultural continuity for expatriated families rather than sites of added quality or social advantaging. Meanwhile, criticism that the IB’s curriculum reinforced the prominence of Western systems of knowledge was dismissed by Correa and his supporters as being the outrage of an elite class fearful of any challenge to the status quo. To further enable a sense of equivalency, Correa’s administration established a series of conjunctional policies aimed at ensuring that public and private school students could have equal opportunity once they successfully completed the program. This included the creation of large-scale scholarship programs that sought to encourage public school students to leverage the IB’s graduating diploma to gain access to higher education institutions abroad, mainly in North America and Europe. For instance, The Universidades de Excelencia [Universities of Excellence] scholarship offered up to $250,000 for students admitted into a select group of prestigious universities abroad. As I would later learn, these existing policy conditions greatly channeled IB students’ aspirations, where higher education abroad was the main, and sometimes sole, motivation to enroll in the program.

Conceptual Framework Consistent with theories of social closure, the IB agreement strived to open and democratize career pathways by addressing existing processes of academic and credential exclusion that historically served to control and restrict key positions. Drawing on Persell et al.’s (1992) concept of “differential asset conversion,”1 I became interested in discerning how students’ social class backgrounds and institutional memberships may inform their abilities to convert their IB experiences and credentials into subsequent academic opportunities and professional gains. Driving this interest was a concern that unequal processes of “capital conversion”2 (see Bourdieu, 2007) could severely limit the IB agreement’s democratizing goals. Worse, it could serve to further sanction elites’ claims of their status by allowing unequal outcomes to remain, despite the existence of presumably comparable educational experiences and opportunities. To this end, I decided to conduct a comparative case study of two high schools offering the Diploma Programme

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but catering to socially dissimilar student demographics. My intent was examining the experiences of the intended beneficiaries of the IB agreement (public-school students) and those it attempted to challenge (elite private school students).

Methods Traditionally, private and public schools in Ecuador served very distinct student populations; private schools catered exclusively to high and middle-classes and public schools to low-income families. The rapid emergence of low-fee private schools during the past 20 years has somewhat blurred private and public distinctions (Resnik, 2014). Unable to rely on a public or private distinction as a proxy for social class, I decided to base my selection decisions on the prospective schools’ cost and admissions requirements. Based on these considerations, I identified Unidad Educativa Carlos Tobar (UECT) and St. Augustine3 as ideal sites. UECT was one of the first authorized public schools to offer the IB. Like most public schools in Ecuador, it maintained an open admissions policy based on a lottery system. Moreover, most students came from households that earned $600 a month, and only one parent had formal employment.4 St. Augustine, on the other hand, was an exclusive private institution with approximately $1,000 in monthly tuition fees. Additionally, it employed stringent admission requirements that included mandatory enrollment in kindergarten and legacy preferences. Although the schools were socially different, they catered exclusively to Ecuadorian students and were in the same city and were only a few miles apart. Data collection was phased and occurred synchronously, where between March and July 2018, I alternated my visits to each site. For the first two months, I conducted classroom observations, compiled a wide variety of artifacts, attended school events, and engaged in informal conversations with students and staff. Consistent with Merriam and Tisdell’s (2016) advice, these early data sources allowed me to learn “enough about a situation to formulate questions for subsequent interviews” (p. 111). While I continued observing classes, during the month of May, I began scheduling semi-structured interviews. Since the study primarily focused on student experiences, I decided to begin the interview process with staff, thus allowing an added layer of insight prior to conducting student interviews. I interviewed staff members who were either directly or indirectly associated with the IB. This included school deans, IB coordinators, college counselors, and teachers. Between both schools, I interviewed 10 staff members. Once staff interviews concluded, I worked in conjunction with the IB coordinators of each school to select student interviewees. I sought a sample that included an equal distribution of female and male students and included varying levels of academic attainment. Between both schools, I interviewed 21 students. Throughout data collection, I followed what Bartlett and Vavrus (2017) refer to as “constant comparison,” an approach that strives to use emerging

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insights into how a phenomenon or process unfolds in one locale to understand what is happening in the other. I also adhered to what Sobe (2018) calls a relational approach to comparison, which acknowledges that a study’s participants are not only capable of comparison but are active and immersed in their own comparative processes, instinctively drawing on their understandings of different sites and scales in the effort to make sense of previous experiences and deliberate future ones. To this end, I conceived of comparison as being both a mode of analysis and an interview technique, where participants were actively encouraged to draw on their own understandings of social class relations in Ecuador in the effort to think and even speculate on how their experiences may compare to those unfolding in the other site of study. At times, this approach required a personal willingness to discuss observations and emerging insights from one school with participants from the other. This relational approach to comparison helped shape my study in two important ways. First, it provided added depth into how participants perceived their contexts and negotiated its potential boundaries. In this sense, it helped avoid the pitfalls of conceiving of context as “delimited, a priori, by culture, space or time” (Bartlett & Vavrus, 2019, p. 194), by highlighting how participants’ conceptions of context actively drew on both experiences unfolding within a presumably bounded space (i.e., a school) and historical understandings and relations of power occurring on a far larger scale. Second, inviting participants to engage with comparison helped nuance and even redirect the intent of the study to reflect their interests, perspectives, and insights. In some instances, it even served to dispel my preconceived understandings that often overemphasized the materiality of schooling and ignored the symbolic conditions of each school. To exemplify my use of a relational approach to comparison, I will focus on two formative and closely related moments. ¿Cómo así te ayudan? Students’ Aspirations as an Individual Accomplishment Nearly all UECT students discussed higher education abroad as the main motivation to first enroll and later remain in the IB. Diana, an energetic student who lived in the southern outskirts of the city, was interested in studying biology in the United States. Much like her peers, she was confused by the numerous application requirements and uncertain about how to proceed. I was aware that the school did not provide any counseling services and became curious about how students navigated the complex landscape of higher education abroad, often in a language in which they had limited proficiency. During a conversation, Diana noted her frustration and revealed that most of the information she was able to gather was through message boards and paid advertisements found on social media platforms, such as Facebook. Upon hearing of these strategies, I inquired as to whether anyone at the school provided informal guidance or even help during this

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process. She returned a puzzled look and replied, “What do you mean, they help you?” [cómo así te ayudan?]. In response, I shared some of the services I observed at St. Augustine, which included numerous college fairs and two full-time college counsellors. With a look of disbelief, Diana responded, “That is messed up [Ay que hecho pedazos]; all I have is a small binder at home.” Noticing her dismay, I wondered aloud whether students’ frustrations would be mitigated if UECT were able to provide similar counselling services as those I observed at St. Augustine. Diana quickly contested my hypothetical solution, stating: This is not something that the school, that a public school, will worry about. Because in addition to paying teacher salaries, having to organize classes of 40 students, and grade levels of 200 [students], they [public schools] don’t have the infrastructure, nor the capital, nor the time, nor the patience, nor the dedication to put themselves to help kids they think are running around getting drunk. According to Diana, the lack of support and guidance was not restricted to budgetary constraints or even a lack of institutional capacity. It also included a prevailing view of public students and what they should accomplish. UECT operated under a constrained budget that was visually evident in the school’s precarious infrastructure and outdated facilities. As a result, I was under the assumption that student success services were beyond the school’s scope of consideration given the existence of more pressing needs such as enabling internet access within the school. Diana’s assertion provided an additional layer of nuance with clear echoes of what Gorski (2008) refers to as the “culture of poverty,” a discredited yet pervasive paradigm that attributes poverty to a common set of beliefs, behaviors, and dispositions, such as a lack of orientation towards the future and a propensity for substance abuse. Aligned with this view, teachers seemed to question students’ frustrations with the application process, believing that access to higher education abroad was the result of students’ willingness to plan and persevere when confronted with obstacles. As Maria, a second-year English teacher, argued, “[students] have to realize that the IB only does one part and that is it. Now it’s up to them, how they prepare themselves and what they do to qualify for universities abroad.” Given these framings, students’ inability to gain admission into higher education institutions abroad was viewed as being the result of their personal shortcomings and unwillingness to persist, rather than a byproduct of personal circumstances, institutional practices, and/or broader structural arrangements. As Francisco, the school’s longest tenured teacher, succinctly noted, “Those who go [abroad] is not because they have more money, but because they are good searchers [buenos buscones].”

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“They are not willing to do their part”: Students’ Aspirations as a Collaborative Accomplishment Unlike UECT, St. Augustine provided a wide variety of opportunities for student success and hosted numerous college fairs. Each year, approximately 250 different universities visited the school, providing students with valuable information about admission requirements and the availability of funding. More importantly, students were able to attend smaller events with different university representatives where they could ask questions and share their personal experiences and academic interests. While seemingly inconsequential, these smaller events allowed students to meet the representative who would be reading their application and could potentially advocate on their behalf during committee decisions. To ensure that students fully benefited from this opportunity, St. Augustine’s college counselors engaged in a form of “impression management” (see Goffman, 1959) that included preparing students beforehand by identifying what experiences they should discuss and helping determine what questions they should ask the college representatives. Echoing Stevens (2009) insights, through these interactions, St. Augustine students ceased being anonymous applicants and became “people, with faces and physical demeanors and personalities” (p. 84). Along with the benefits of hosting college fairs, St. Augustine’s teachers and staff deliberately identified opportunities and provided experiences for students to strengthen their college applications and improve their chances at admissions. This included promoting numerous and thematically diverse competitions that both recognized and credentialed student participants. Reminiscent of what Demerath (2009) describes as “hypercredentialing,” these technologies of recognition allowed students to “signal” to admissions committees that their academic interests and prowess carried real-world value. Due to their frequency, competitions were extremely difficult to track in advance. For instance, when I asked John, a school administrator, about the date for a poetry competition I was hoping to attend, he responded, “I have no idea. There are competitions here every week; it’s hard to keep up.” To gain a further understanding of the extent of services available at St. Augustine, I decided to schedule a meeting with the school’s college counseling office. I met Philip, one of St. Augustine’s college counselors, one afternoon in his spacious office, decorated with posters displaying the scenic campuses of the private, liberal arts colleges many of the school’s students would eventually attend. During a lengthy conversation, Philip detailed the numerous services the St. Augustine provided, expressing frustration that while the school’s students had very ambitious admission goals, many were not always “willing to do their part.” I proceeded to contrast these available services with UECT, noting that the school not only lacked counseling services but also did not provide extracurricular activities, promote credentialing

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competitions, or host any college fairs. Aware of these conditions, he lamented, “It is unfortunate because there are probably a lot of brilliant kids here in public schools.” After a brief pause, he added, “We should really be doing more pro-bono work, you know. Or at least begin inviting public schools to our college fairs and events.” Indeed, only students from socially similar private schools attended St. Augustine-sponsored events and competitions. Kenway and Lazarus (2017) argue that elite schools often engage in a process of ideological maneuvering, simultaneously avowing and disavowing class power and privilege. Philip’s response reflects such a process, where his call for benevolence and charitable giving acknowledges injustice but ultimately serves to deflect critical attention away from existing practices such as “hypercredentialing” that are intended on providing students an arguably unfair “admission boost.” These forms of “institutional advantaging” were not only unquestioned, but they were also viewed as an integral part of the school’s commitment to the well-being of its students. Unlike in UECT, where higher education abroad was believed to be entirely predicated on students’ willingness to persevere when confronted with obstacles and setbacks, St. Augustine was prepared “to do its part” to maximize students’ possibilities for success. The material conditions and institutional histories undoubtedly informed UECT and St. Augustine’s engagements with higher education abroad. Emerging insights, however, suggested that undergirding these engagements were different logics and assumptions within each school about who is, and should be, responsible for students’ aspirational goals. Aligned with Bartlett and Vavrus’ (2017) call for researchers to “follow the inquiry” (p. 1), I drew on this insight not only to interpret previous observations, but also to serve as an anchor for each subsequent stage in the inquiry. I was interested in thinking beyond the availability of student success services by examining how teachers and students enacted and even contested these logics in their daily practices of schooling. I was particularly intent on observing the request and granting of academic concessions such as extensions, accommodations, grade adjustments, and extra credit opportunities. The goal was to consider how these different logics might contribute to uneven processes of “capital conversion,” thus interfering with the IB agreement’s stated intent of democratizing opportunity.

Student Aspirations and Daily Practices of Schooling In the far corner of UECT’s IB office was a white board covered with different student messages, mostly in English. One message stated, “What if you are an IB student? What if you don’t have an extended essay or a history investigation? Just shake it off.” The notion of “shaking it off” provides an organizing concept that helps describe and explain existing engagements with academic concessions within the school. Not only did students decline to

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request accommodations, extensions, or extra credit opportunities, but they also struggled to push back against existing rules and expectations, even those that were clearly to their detriment. In these moments, students often acquiesced, finding other outlets, such as humor, to “shake off” their frustrations. These strategies were not necessarily the result of a deference to authority, but rather were the outcome of both critique of existing institutional practices and feelings of helplessness. An early morning IB English exam exemplified the notion of “shaking it off.” As was customary, the teacher had emailed students a PDF version of the exam the night prior, with the expectation that students would bring printed copies the following day to class. Most students, however, did not own printers and relied exclusively on the printing services available at the school. On this occasion, many of the school’s printers were malfunctioning, leading to a large backlog and significant delays. After waiting for nearly half an hour, students were finally able to receive their printed copies, but now they had very limited time to complete an exam that included multiple short readings, comprehension questions, and a standard five-paragraph essay. While students were frantically writing their responses, the teacher stood up at her desk and walked to the doorway, where she provided a five-minute warning. Perhaps sensing the absurdity of the situation, one student proceeded to ask a classmate, “Mateo, how do you write an essay in five minutes?” eliciting laughter from his peers. Upon hearing the dismissal siren, students proceeded to submit their exams without complaint. After class, I approached the teacher to inquire about her interpretation of this notable moment. During our conversation, she defended her decision, highlighting the importance of a regimented and rule-governed approach to classroom management, stating, “I know the students may be upset, but these are the rules, and everyone had the same amount of time. If they took advantage of it or not, was really up to them and not me.” In contrast, St. Augustine’s students were incessant in their requests for academic concessions, and often viewed rules as flexible and therefore negotiable. Teachers most often complied, framing students’ requests for extra credit and extensions as opportunities for “further learning.” One teacher even spoke in a local conference attended by other private schools about the emotional and academic importance of not penalizing late work. As she explained, “By not giving students second opportunities and simply giving a zero or taking away a lot of points, you are not encouraging them to do the work necessary to gain mastery in the skills of the class.” Students took advantage of the leeway afforded by teachers, requesting concessions to help accommodate their busy schedules that included a wide variety of extracurricular activities. While students were cognizant of these behaviors, they failed to recognize the multiple benefits it afforded. Rather, it was framed as innocuous, the result of a shared proclivity to “whine” and “complain.”

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A small group of St. Augustine teachers disagreed with the granting of academic concessions. Renata, one of the school’s longest tenured employees, argued that the pervasiveness of concessions was not only unfair, but it also greatly interfered with teachers’ attempts to uphold academic rigor in their classrooms. Nonetheless, she felt pressured to cede and often did, claiming that the school’s leadership offered little support to teachers who were inclined to say “no.” Frustrated, she noted that students were aware that their requests were likely to receive administrative backing and, therefore, knew “that if they insist enough, they will eventually get what they want.” Much like Calarco’s (2017) concept of “negotiated advantage,” St. Augustine students’ insistence provided important profits that ranged from multiple opportunities to improve their grades to flexible deadlines aimed at accommodating extracurricular interests and pursuits. Although discrepancies existed in each school, there seemed to be a rather consistent cultural logic guiding how each site engaged with student success services and academic concessions. Within UECT, there was a prevailing view that students’ aspirations were beyond the purview of the school’s responsibility. This logic provides an explanatory lens to a wide variety of practices, including the absence of success services and informal mentoring, teachers’ regimented approach to classroom management, and students’ own acquiescence to perceived injustices. Meanwhile, at St. Augustine, there was a prevailing view that students’ aspirational goals were a collaborative accomplishment resulting from students’ personal efforts and engagement with the multiple services and strategies of personal advancement available within the school. Existing practices knowingly provided students an “admission boost” that could be constituted as unfair. While criticism did exist among teachers and even students, it was scant and largely silent. Instead, these practices were encouraged and framed as evidence of the school’s commitment to its students’ well-being.

Concluding Thoughts and New Directions When placed in conversation with Bourdieu’s (2007) concept of capital conversion, this study highlights how logics that extend beyond the material conditions of each school may directly inform students’ abilities to leverage the IB for subsequent academic opportunities and professional gains. Indeed, differing understandings of how students’ aspirations are accomplished carry the potential to bolster or diminish the value of conversion of the IB’s graduating diploma. These logics remain largely outside the purview of public debates, which often reduce inequality to the unequal access to resources. The absence of these logics in public discourse raises a concern of the unintended consequences the IB agreement may produce, where the persistence of uneven outcomes may further sanction elite’s claims of their privileged status by portraying public school students as unable or unwilling to take advantage of presumably similar opportunities. Beyond the IB

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agreement, these findings raise questions about the different ways discourses of “care” can function as instruments of social reproduction. In the case of this study, a discourse of care served to justify and compel St. Augustine’s staff to provide students with numerous advantages that were arguably unfair. While much of the existing literature on “care” focuses on the experiences of “students of color, poor children and female students” (Toshalis, 2011, p. 3), there is a need to examine the operationalization and enactment of the concept in elite spaces such as St. Augustine. Methodologically, this chapter exemplifies CCS’ processual approach to inquiry while highlighting the affordance of an iterative research design that is responsive to serendipitous findings. It also aimed to illustrate Tom’s (1998) argument of how an iterative research design constitutive of a processual approach is conducive to an engagement with a comparison that is constant, relational, and collaborative. To conclude, I want to underscore that a processual approach is not merely a “researcher disposition” indicating comfort with ambiguity, a commitment to co-construction, and a willingness to reflect on the direction of inquiry. Rather, it requires decisions throughout the research process, including in early designs. In this study, two early design decisions greatly facilitated my engagement with a processual approach. First, my use of a phased approach to data collection allowed for an early engagement with observations that were open and purposefully diverse. Second, synchronous data collection at two schools aided my use of constant comparison, where observations from one site could immediately be used to interrogate what was occurring in the other. It is important to acknowledge, however, that due to existing time and budgetary constraints, these design decisions are not always available or possible. Nonetheless, I encourage readers interested in the CCS approach to consider the different ways they may embed a processual approach into their early research design.

Discussion Questions 1

2

Based on his study of two high schools in Ecuador, Bittencourt argues that students’ abilities to convert the IB diploma into future academic opportunities is limited by the material and symbolic conditions of each school and by the enactment of “care” by the schools’ staff. How did his use of vertical and horizontal comparison produce these findings? This study exemplifies how a researcher can employ comparison as an interview technique to engage participants more fully in the research process. How, specifically, did Bittencourt do so, and what were some of the most interesting insights from your perspective? If you were to carry out a CCS, how might you use comparison in interviews with your potential participants?

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Notes 1 Drawing on Bourdieu’s (2007) “forms of capital,” differential asset conversion refers to the possibility that the economic, social, and cultural-capital assets that influence the opportunities and life chances of one group may fail to work in the same ways for members of a different group. 2 Bourdieu (2007) argues that capital can present itself under three fundamental guises: economic, social, and cultural. While seemingly different, “economic capital is at the root of all the other types of capital,” where social and cultural iterations are merely “transformed, disguised forms of economic capital” (p. 91). A shared root implies that through a form of labor, conversion is possible, and capital can be transmuted from one form to another, a process that Bourdieu refers to as “capital conversion.” 3 Both names of schools are pseudonyms. 4 In the city where this study was conducted, the mean monthly income per capita is $1001 (UESII, 2021).

References Ball, S. (1998). Big policies/small world: An introduction to international perspectives in education policy. Comparative Education, 34(2), 119–130. Barnett, E., Tokuhama-Espinos, T., Rivera, M., Montero, L. A., & Palacios, T. P. (2013). Research on the implementation of the Diploma Programme in Ecuador’s state schools. National Center for Restructuring Education, Schools, and Training. Bartlett, L., & Vavrus, F. (2017). Rethinking case study research: A comparative approach. Routledge. Baxter, J. (2016). Who governs educational change? The paradoxes of state power and the pursuit of educational reform in Post-Neoliberal Ecuador (2007–2015). (Unpublished doctoral dissertation). University of Maryland. Bourdieu, P. (2007). The forms of capital. In A. Sadovnik (Ed.), Sociology of education: A critical reader (2nd ed., pp. 83–96). Routledge. Bunnell, T. (2016). The dearth of International Baccalaureate schools across Africa. Africa Education Review, 13(2), 181–195. Calarco, J. M. (2018). Negotiating opportunities: How the middle class secures advantages in school. Oxford University Press. Conaghan, C., & de la Torre, C. (2008). The permanent campaign of Rafael Correa: Making Ecuador’s plebiscitary presidency. Press/Politics, 13(3), 267–284. Demerath, P. (2009). Producing success: The culture of personal advancement in an American high school. The University of Chicago Press. European Union Election Observation Mission (EUEOM). (2009). Final Report on Presidential and Parliamentary Elections. http://www.eods.eu/library/FR%20ECUA DOR%2006.2009_en.pdf. Goffman, E. (1959). The presentation of self in everyday life. Doubleday. Gorski, P. (2008). The myth of the “culture of poverty”. Educational Leadership, 65(7), 32–36. IBO. (2021). International Baccalaureate. https://www.ibo.org/. Isch, E. L. (2011). Las actuales propuestas y desafíos en educación: El caso Ecuatoriano [The current proposals and challenges in education: The case of Ecuador]. Educação & Sociedade, 32(115), 373–391. Jokisch, B., & Pribilsky, J. (2002). The panic to leave: Economic crisis and the “new emigration” from Ecuador. International Migration, 40(4), 75–102.

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Kenway, J., & Lazarus, M. (2019). Elite schools, class disavowal and the mystification of virtues. Social Semiotics, 27(3), 265–275. Larrea Oña, T. (2007). ¿En qué Pensamos los Ecuatorianos al Hablar de la Democracia [What do we Ecuadorians think when we speak about democracy]? Quito: Participación Ciudadana. Lind, A. (2012). Contradictions that endure: Family norms, social reproduction, and Rafael Corea’s Citizen Revolution in Ecuador. Politics & Gender, 8(2), 254–261. Martinez, C., & de la Torre, C. (2010). Racial discrimination and citizenship in Ecuador’s educational system. Latin American and Caribbean Ethnic Studies, 5(1), 1–26. Merriam, S. B., & Tisdell, E. J. (2016). Qualitative research: A guide to design and implementation (4th ed.). Jossey-Bass. Mignolo, W. D., & Walsh, C. E. (2018). On decoloniality: Concepts, analytics and praxis. Duke University Press. Ministerio de Educación. (2011). LEY ORGÁNICA DE EDUCACIÓN INTERCULTURAL [Organic law of intercultural education]. Quito: Ministerio de Educación. https://educacion.gob.ec/wp-content/uploads/downloads/2017/05/Ley-Organica-Educa cion-Intercultural-Codificado.pdf. Persell, C., Catsambis, S., & Cookson Jr., P. (1992). Differential asset conversion: Class and gendered pathways to selective colleges. Sociology of Education, 65(3), 208–225. Radcliffe, S. A. (2012). Development for a postneoliberal era? Sumak Kawsay, living well and the limits to decolonisation in Ecuador. Geoforum, 43, 240–249. Resnik, J. (2012). The denationalization of education and the expansion of the International Baccalaureate. Comparative Education Review, 56(2), 248–269. Resnik, J. (2014). Who gets the best teachers? The incorporation of the IB program into public high schools and its impact on teacher labor market in Ecuador. In R. Arber, J. Blackmore, & A. Vongalis-Macrow (Eds.), Mobile teachers, teacher identity and international schooling (pp. 95–119). Sense Publishers. Schneider, B. R., Estarellas, P. C., & Bruns, B. (2019). The politics of transforming education in Ecuador: Confrontation and continuity, 2006–2017. Comparative Education Review, 63(2), 259–280. Sobe, N. (2018). Problematizing comparison in a post-exploration age: Big data, educational knowledge, and the art of criss-crossing. Comparative Education Review, 62 (3), 325–343. Stevens, M. L. (2007). Creating a class: College admissions and the education of elites. Harvard University Press. Tamayo, M. L. (2014). La educación en el Ecuador 1980–2007 [Education in Ecuador 1980–2007]. Revista Iberoamericano de Educación, 65(1), 1–15. Tom, A. (1996). Building collaborative research: Living the commitment to emergent design. Qualitative Studies in Education, 9(3), 347–359. Toshalis, E. (2011). The rhetoric of care: Preservice teacher discourses that depoliticize, deflect, and deceive. Urban Review, 44, 1–35. UESII. (2021). City Quito. Urban Environment and Social Inclusion Index. https://da tadrivenlab.org/urban/cities/quito/. Van Oord, L. (2007). To westernize the nations? An analysis of the International Baccalaureate’s philosophy of Education. Cambridge Journal of Education, 37(3), 375–390.

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Walsh, C. (2009). The plurinational and intercultural state: Decolonization and state refounding in Ecuador. Kult 6, Special Issue on Epistemologies of Transformation: The Latin American Decolonial Option and its Ramifications, 65–85. Walsh, C. (2010). Development as Buen Vivir: Institutional arrangements and (de) colonial entanglements. Development, 53(1), 15–21. Yemini, M., & Dvir, Y. (2016). International Baccalaureate as a litmus test revealing conflicting values and power relations in the Israeli education system. Discourse: Studies in the Cultural Politics of Education, 37(2), 310–323.

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Special Education Policy and Practice Across Scales Providing a Free Appropriate Public Education During a Pandemic Helen Rose Miesner

Introduction Nearly every aspect of special education teachers’ work in the U.S. relates to the enactment of the federal Individuals with Disabilities in Education Improvement Act ([IDEIA], 2004). IDEIA requires that students with disabilities have access to a “free, appropriate public education” (FAPE). Legally binding Individualized Educational Programs (IEPs) codify these requirements by specifying the instructional services to which individual students are entitled in addition to general education programming, and outlines the core work of special education teachers. Additionally, federal policy requires that FAPE must be delivered in the “least restrictive environment” in which the needs of a student with disabilities can be met. Though teachers carry out IDEIA, factors across scales and contexts— including conflicting policies (Russell & Bray, 2013), budgetary limitations (Kolbe, 2019), and teacher shortages (Sutcher et al., 2016)—inform how IDEIA happens at the school level. In this chapter, I ask: How did actors across scales, from the Office of Special Education Programs (OSEP) to special education teachers, take up FAPE during the COVID-19 pandemic, and how did these processes shape FAPE in practice? I leverage theoretical and methodological components of the comparative case study (CCS) approach to understand the interplay of actors across macro- (federal), meso- (district and state), and micro- (school) levels; the enactment of FAPE in distinct, socially produced locations; and the development and appropriation of FAPE across time and space. I find that actors across scales differentially emphasized what FAPE entailed and who was responsible for its provision. Federal guidance spoke to the role of state and local agencies in providing FAPE, state guidance cited the role of district agencies, and a district agency asserted that FAPE was ultimately the purview of special education teachers. Though federal and state actors recognized FAPE as part of a child’s broader educational program, district and school entities prioritized specially designed instruction provided by a special education teacher amid logistical complications wrought by the COVID-19 pandemic. These findings demonstrate how actors across scales DOI: 10.4324/9781003216551-7

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differentially approach federal statute and the consequent ramifications for practice, providing insight into how and why policy takes form in practice and which opportunities exist for practitioners and policymakers to better support the provision of FAPE.

Literature and Theoretical Framework In 1975, the United States Congress enacted the Education for All Handicapped Children Act (EHA) with bipartisan support. Following the rhetoric of equality and solidarity invoked by the Civil Rights Act (1964), the EHA promised a free and appropriate education for all students with disabilities. Later dubbed the Individuals with Disabilities Education Improvement Act (IDEIA), this statute defines FAPE in §602(9) as: special education and related services that—(A) have been provided at public expense, under public supervision and direction, and without charge; (B) meet the standards of the State educational agency; (C) include an appropriate preschool, elementary school, or secondary school education in the State involved; and (D) are provided in conformity with the individualized education program (IEP) required under section 614(d). The U.S. Supreme Court further clarified FAPE in 2017, noting that IDEIA “requires an educational program reasonably calculated to enable a child to make progress appropriate in light of the child’s circumstances” (Endrew F. v. Douglas County School District RE-1, 2017). Importantly, FAPE encompasses the entire school-based educational experience of a child with disabilities, including specially designed instruction and related services provided by special education teachers, therapists, and paraprofessionals and general education instruction provided by grade level teachers (unless explicitly specified in a child’s IEP). Though seemingly codified in statute, FAPE remains subjectively practiced across and, at times, within organizations. The structure of IEP meetings, for instance, shapes the extent to which teachers and parents or guardians participate with consequent ramifications for how FAPE is conceptualized within the IEP (Ruppar & Gaffney, 2011). The extent to which inclusion is emphasized school-wide can also inform teachers’ determination of students’ classroom placements (Bray & Russell, 2018). Further, teachers draw on their personal beliefs and professional experiences when deciding how and if to engage evidenced-based practices (Hudson et al., 2016), the extent to which to include students with disabilities in the general education setting (Brandes & Crowson, 2009), and if and how they grant students with disabilities access to the general education curriculum (Ruppar et al., 2017). Prior research also illustrates those factors beyond individual educators, including organizational conditions and sociopolitical contexts, influence

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U.S. special education policy implementation in ways that vary across locales. School-level organizational conditions, such as administrative support, school climate, and relationships among colleagues, families, and students (Bettini et al., 2016) influence special education teachers’ instructional decisions (Ruppar et al., 2015). Limited staffing (Ghere & York-Barr, 2007) and scheduling complications (Miesner, 2021) can compromise special education teachers’ ability to provide students with specialized instruction and thus undermine FAPE. Further, special educators driven by a “logic of compliance” (Voulgarides, 2018, p. 84) become overly focused on completing policy-driven tasks like meeting deadlines for special education paperwork rather than attending substantively to the education of students with disabilities. Broader sociopolitical factors also influence special education in practice, mostly through their impact on budgets. Neoliberal education reforms, including voucher programs and charter schools, result in the transfer of public funds to private organizations and contribute to fiscal precarity within public school programs that can impact students with disabilities (Braun, 2017). Further, though Congress is authorized to cover 40% of the additional costs that states incur to educate students with disabilities, federal contributions covered just 15% of these costs as of 2019 (Kolbe, 2019). This absence of federal funding places the financial onus on state and local institutions, which respond by restricting service hours, limiting hiring of personnel, and, in one state’s case, placing an illegal cap on the number of students who can be identified as disabled (National Council of Disability, 2018). Though IDEIA mandates schools maintain special education funding by matching contributions from the prior year, most districts presently cannot fully comply with IDEIA requirements due to resource constraints (Voulgarides, 2018). Thus, sociopolitical, federal, and state contexts bolster or constrain the resources to which educators have access and influence the extent to which they can enact IDEIA in practice. The present study leverages CCS to trace how actors and processes at the federal, state, district, and school scales mediate FAPE within one public school district in the United States. I ground this research in a sociocultural approach to policy analysis, which holds that policy is “a complex social practice, an ongoing process of normative cultural production constituted by diverse actors across diverse social and institutional contexts” (Levinson & Sutton, 2001, p. 1). The methodologies, frameworks, and tools used within the sociocultural approach—including CCS—consequently embody the assumption that policy is not a linear operation of outputs and inputs but a nuanced, shifting process. In this tradition, I take up Ball, Maguire, and Braun’s (2012) concept of “enactment” to examine how policy is “interpreted and translated and reconstructed and remade in different but similar settings” (p. 6) by a network of actors, living and non-living. This lens provides insight into how multiple contexts, ranging from federal responses to the pandemic to varied remote learning environments, as well as actors and their varying motives, inform policy in practice.

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Study Context The CCS approach encourages scholars to consider how the study’s context extends beyond the immediate physical setting to include broader historical and sociopolitical elements that shape policy processes. To locate and interrogate the forces and factors that shape FAPE, I examine context through the lens of scale. I delineate scales based on the intended reach of policies created at these levels relative to other scales. The interplay of actors across scales contributes to a broader context that comprises the political economy of special education. However, dividing study context by scale provides an opportunity to understand where factors that shape policy in practice originate when they may otherwise be obscured. I conducted this research across four distinct scales—federal, state, district, and school. I situated my study in two elementary schools, Bradbury1 and Thompson, which I purposively sampled (Merriam, 1998) for their relatively similar student populations and educational programming. Both schools are in Firglade, a mid-sized Midwestern school district. Special education teachers in this state take on cross-categorical roles in which they work with students with varied needs, ranging from autism to emotionalbehavioral disorder, during their workday. Rather than specializing in a single disability category, special education teachers in this state must deliver FAPE to students with diverse needs in a manner that complies with the federal statute. I examine these scales during the COVID-19 time period, specifically March 2020 through June 2021, while drawing on policy created prior to this period as a point of comparison. The pandemic and accompanying policy responses created unprecedented challenges for actors across scales. In addition to changing the nature of schooling for students and educators and administrators’ work, this period also shaped the spaces in which actors conducted their work, as virtual platforms replaced physical spaces and created new dimensions within school and administrative contexts. Though teachers continued to grapple with material factors, such as technology and internet access as a direct result of the pandemic, considerations of physical space changed amid shifts to virtual instruction and informed the methodological approach to this research. Though analytical pragmatism calls for some delineation of scale, my conception of context within this study is necessarily fluid. While schools, for example, function as specific organizational contexts, they also overlap with and are shaped by the temporal context of COVID-19. Similarly, while the practices of a single grade level teaching team serve as context, these decisions are informed by a federal government with a legacy of underfunding special education. Further, as schooling moved from physical settings to virtual spaces, events ranging from morning meeting routines to assignment of students to breakout rooms to interruptions borne of technical difficulties come to comprise context independent of the physical space

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of schools. Herein, I illustrate how processes across scales related to one another, forming a fluctuating space in which a fragmented version of special education policy was put into practice.

Methods I employed CCS to link the framing of FAPE by administrative organizations to the practical, day-to-day work of special education teachers. The observations and interviews in which I ground this CCS took place exclusively through Zoom video conferencing software due to COVID-19, rather than the physical spaces that typically comprise education research fieldwork. This format further highlighted how practices and processes come to comprise context independent of the physical space of schools. As such, data collection took place across several different contexts throughout a nine-month period, ranging from three virtual 3rd grade classrooms in the Firglade district to a publicly accessible statewide student services conference catered to district administrators. I employed ethnographic methods, including interviews, observations, and document analysis, to collect data over the course of the 2020–21 school year (see Table 6.1). My approach to data collection reflects my conception of scale, which I delineate based on the intended reach of policies created at these levels relative to other scales. I began with scales in which actors held comparatively smaller spheres of influence, namely classrooms and schools, and then extended to scales in which actors attempted to exert progressively broader influence, including the district, state, and federal level. In this work, I position teachers as cases to foreground policy as carried out in practice rather than emphasizing the school contexts that inform these practices. I centered my data collection on two focal special education teachers, both of whom were the primary case managers of 3rd grade students with disabilities at their respective schools. Though I initially intended to observe every special education teacher at each school, limiting my observations to two practitioners enabled a deeper examination of how demands that varied throughout the year, such as paperwork deadlines, shaped the work of special education teachers. I conducted three semi-structured interviews with both teachers over the course of the 2020–21 school year and observed focal special education teachers within their virtual teaching and collaborating environments over the course of nine weeks dispersed throughout the school year. Through these observations, I triangulated the assertions of focal teachers regarding the influence of various actors on their work and uncovered additional factors for consideration. To gain insight into how other school-level professionals inform special education policy, I then extended my data collection outward to include interviews and observations of other actors at each of the two schools. I interviewed staff, such as grade-level teachers, school-based special education directors, and principals, to further triangulate and contextualize the

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Table 6.1 Data Collection

Bradbury Elementary School

Interviews

Observations





      

Thompson Elementary School



Totals

  

Focal special education teacher (3 interviews) Principal Special education program support teacher Additional special education teacher



District director of student services State director of special education Executive director of special education advisory non-profit  Two parents of students with disabilities 26 interviews



  

Additional

Focal special education teacher (3 interviews) Principal Special education program support teacher Four additional special education teachers School psychologist Speech and language pathologist School social worker Third grade teacher

  



Focal special education teacher (82 total hours) Individualized education program meetings (2 hours) Special education team meetings (4 hours) School meeting with assistant director of student services (1 hour)

Focal special education teacher (51 total hours) Special education team meeting (1 hour)

State superintendent’s special education conference (3.5 hours)

144.5 observation hours

experiences of special education teachers (LeCompte & Schensul, 2010). During the interview and observation period, I concurrently analyzed relevant school-based documents (Miles et al., 2014), including school newsletters, teachers’ schedules, and staff memoranda, to further contextualize and triangulate participant claims. I also examined processes at broader scales, interviewing district and state level staff and observing a meeting between district and school level staff to identify policy interpretations and priorities. To further contextualize these data, I analyzed documents about FAPE and responses to COVID-19 from district, state, and federal sources, connecting the work and perceptions of practitioners to iterations of policy codified in text. These documents include IDEIA, district and state budgets, state-wide special education bulletins, and federal guidance regarding school openings during COVID-19. I created a comparative matrix to organize these data and identify places of consensus and incoherence across these documents (Corbin & Strauss, 2008). I also conducted within-case analysis of interviews and observational field notes to identify how individual participants engage with FAPE, followed by

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cross-case and multi-scalar analysis to synthesize my data toward a broader understanding of policy processes and factors that shape individual enactments of FAPE (Stake, 2006). I drew on structural codes that allowed me to categorize and label data as it related to my conceptual and methodological frameworks, including practitioner policy enactment and contextual influences on special education in practice to highlight and explore the relationships among actors and elements across scales (Saldaña, 2016). I also wrote analytic memos throughout data collection and analysis to pilot theories, identify patterns, and facilitate reflexive practice (Saldaña, 2016).

Findings Actors across scales varied in how they referenced FAPE and identified who was responsible for its provision. Federal guidance spoke to the role of state and district agencies in providing FAPE, state guidance cited the role of district agencies, and a district agency asserted that FAPE was the purview of special education teachers. Though FAPE encompasses a child’s entire educational program, the special education teachers in this study, driven by perceived district priorities and organizational factors, prioritized specially designed instruction as listed on student IEPs over student engagement with general education curriculum. Virtual learning contexts and the definitions— or lack thereof—presented by actors at the federal, state, and district levels further shaped these enactments of special education policy. In the remainder of this section, I examine how the federal government, state department of special education, Firglade school district, and two special education teachers framed and responded to the provision of FAPE amid COVID-19.

Federal Government As COVID-19 advanced in the United States, the federal government emphasized that schools remained responsible for the provision of FAPE. Schooling moved to virtual modalities as infection rates escalated, and the federal government offered the following guidance regarding district obligations to students with disabilities: School districts must provide a free and appropriate public education (FAPE) consistent with the need to protect the health and safety of students with disabilities and those individuals’ providing education, specialized instruction, and related services to these students. In this unique and ever-changing environment, OCR [Office of Civil Rights] and OSERS [Office of Special Education and Rehabilitative Services] recognize that these exceptional circumstances may affect how all educational and related services and supports are provided, and the Department will offer flexibility where possible. However, school districts must remember that the provision of FAPE may include, as appropriate, special

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education and related services provided through distance instruction provided virtually, online, or telephonically. (U.S. Department of Education, 2020a, p. 1, emphasis added) Herein, the federal government emphasizes that districts remain responsible for FAPE. As special education services are individualized based on a student’s IEP, practitioners require some level of latitude and flexibility to best tailor educational programs to suit each student. However, this bulletin provided minimal guidance as to how practitioners might approach the unprecedented circumstances wrought by the pandemic. For example, despite asserting the viability of remote learning for delivering FAPE, this bulletin did not explicate how practitioners could do so without universal internet or computer access among households. This guidance conveyed the expectation that schools would serve students remotely without guidance on how this education could be made appropriate. After several months, OSEP issued additional documents aimed at guiding the provision of IDEIA amid the pandemic. These guidelines addressed concerns regarding the use of federally disseminated funds (U.S. Department of Education, 2020b) and procedural safeguards (U.S. Department of Education, 2020c). While they granted some flexibility regarding use of funding streams and the acceptance of digital signatures for IEPs, the government remained steadfast in their assertion that FAPE remains intact and did not indicate that any portion of FAPE be prioritized over other portions. A September statement acknowledged the variety of models that schools had adopted in response to the pandemic, ranging from in-person to hybrid to remote models. However, OSEP maintained that “that no matter what primary instructional delivery approach is chosen, SEAs [State Educational Agencies], LEAs [Local Educational Agencies], and individualized education program (IEP) Teams remain responsible for ensuring that a free appropriate public education (FAPE) is provided to all children with disabilities” (U.S. Department of Education, 2020d, p. 2). In addition to preserving FAPE in its entirety, this statement emphasizes the responsibility of state, district, and local actors in providing FAPE.

State Department of Education The state department of education followed the government’s lead, fleshing out guidance in response to the evolution of the pandemic. State communication similarly described FAPE as comprising students’ broader educational programs and information from the state department of education focused on the variety of environments in which school could serve students with disabilities during the pandemic. The state education department communicated such expectations through state-wide bulletins and emails to district administrators. An email from the state director of special education read:

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Helen Rose Miesner While most students are able to receive FAPE effectively through distance learning options, some students with disabilities are not. These students are not able to make the required progress toward their IEP goals and in the general education curriculum solely through distance learning. Consequently, some students with disabilities require instruction, related services, or both, in-person, in order to receive FAPE as required by both state and federal law. This is regardless of the manner in which instruction is being offered to the general school population. (email from State Director to District Administrators, November 20, 2020, emphasis added)

The state government echoed the federal government, emphasizing that FAPE is required for students with disabilities amid the pandemic and encouraging schools to do so within varied environments. This bulletin further highlighted students’ rights to the general education curriculum that may comprise part of FAPE yet did not provide guidance as to how districts could do so. The state director of special education acknowledged the role of the state department of education as a conduit for federal policy. In an interview, they described how the state responded to evolving guidance amid COVID-19. [I]n March, things just snowballed so quickly. So, we worked really closely with the Federal Department of Education on any guidance that they were providing. It was really clear really early that IDEA requirements were not going to be waived. And so, it’s been a little bit of a challenge being at the state department, because we had to enforce and relay this messaging that IDEA requirements to provide FAPE have not been waived […] So, we provided—we just kind of cranked out the guidance and have been adding to, as the situation evolved, we’ve continually added to our guidance. In describing their office’s role, this administrator frames their work as delivering federal expectations to local agencies. However, the administrator also acknowledges the office’s role in further developing guidance in response to the evolution of the pandemic. State administrators disseminated this guidance through bulletins, emails, and a state-wide conference. In addition to describing the environments in which FAPE could be provided, the state department offered concrete examples of that which did or did not comprise FAPE. However, akin to the federal government, the state did not provide explicit guidance on how to navigate ground level challenges that disrupted FAPE, including scheduling and technological access. Instead, the state facilitated workshops among district administrators. As the state director of special education described:

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We shifted a lot of how we work with districts to provide online communities of practice on kind of —and we would take topics, we would solicit topics from districts to say, what do you need here? And then we—for some of the community of practice meetings we bring in experts, or we would just kind of allow—we give a presentation and then allow for networking and problem solving with, “How are you doing this in your district? How are you making this work? Here’s the requirements or the overarching messaging from DPI requirements and the recommendations, and then how are y’all making it work?” We provided a lot of those opportunities. While this excerpt indicates sensitivity to the needs of particular communities, it also places the onus on districts to develop solutions to instructional complications rather than providing scaffolds or options from the state level. The state echoed the federal government in describing FAPE as encompassing specially designed instruction as well as the general education program. Though the state provided a framework for delivering FAPE, actors at this scale deferred to localities regarding the actual provision of this programming. Additionally, while state entities continued to develop guidance regarding FAPE as the situation evolved, they also emphasized the responsibility of district administrators in navigating this unfamiliar terrain.

Firglade School District At the district level, Firglade’s administrator assumed more responsibility for the provision of FAPE. They described their orientation toward policy in an interview, noting: So, our guidance, you know, clearly you don’t want to be deviating from the U.S. Department of Education or O.S.E.P., Office of Special Ed Programs, or [state department of education]. So yes, I think that we certainly drew heavily on their framework for how to create—what their basic guidance is. But at that level, I mean, they’re not getting down into the nitty-gritty. So, they share like conceptually, this is basic guidance. And it’s our job then to put some more specificity and…the processes and the practices aligned to kind of the overall…theoretical framework of their recommendations. This administrator acknowledged the need for specificity and asserted that it is the role of the district to interpret and administer federal policy. They referenced the theoretical framework of state and federal recommendations, which opens FAPE up for interpretation to a greater degree, and the administrator indicated that ground-level practitioners are the arbiters of what does or doesn’t align with this framework.

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Guidance regarding practice was disseminated to teachers through monthly professional development opportunities for special education teachers and monthly meetings between the assistant director of special education and school principals. However, district communication to families indicates that special education teachers were responsible for creating these processes and practices. For instance, a district flyer on “frequently asked questions” (FAQ) for families read: Q: I have an IEP. What accommodations and supports can I expect? A: Your Special Education case manager will review your IEP and communicate with your family/you about the supports that best further your progress on your IEP goals as much as possible during this time. Services will be adjusted based on what can be provided through virtual learning options. (District website, April 22) In addition to highlighting the role of special education teachers in determining services, this document also conveys the district priority for virtual learning options. Further, the district remained guarded in this response regarding what students would actually receive and thus the extent to which FAPE would be realized. Consequently, though the provision of FAPE continued to be honed by the Firglade district, the responsibility for its enactment was passed down to teachers.

Schools School level practitioners prioritized specially designed instruction for individual students rather than access to general education instruction and activities, and thus compromised the provision of FAPE. However, two teachers, Brenda and Greta, made varied attempts to adhere to FAPE by including broader parts of students’ educational programs into their daily schooling experiences. School schedules and elements of virtual learning, such as shifts in instructional format and student absences born of technological malfunctions, further shaped these fragmented attempts toward FAPE in practice. Teachers justified their enactments in relation to scheduling constraints. Both focal practitioners, Brenda and Greta, worked at schools where students were expected to receive two hours of virtual instruction a day. Students without disabilities were expected to attend virtually with their nondisabled peers at this time. However, students with disabilities received some services outside of this block and other services during this block, rather than receiving access to the general education curriculum. Brenda, a teacher of 27 years at Thompson Elementary, mentioned in an interview: But the inequities are they’re not accessing some of the regular instruction. Because we only have this much time [holds hands parallel and close together], you know? And so, in the classroom, [the students]

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would be a part of that regular ed instruction. I would parallel it, or they would be there, and an assistant would support them actually paying attention to it and learning it, whatever. We’ve been told special ed trumps [general education instruction]. So, if all they can get is your time, that’s all they can get. In the final sentences of this quote, Brenda explains that the messaging she received from the district has been to first ensure that students receive the specially designed instruction as dictated per their IEP. However, in doing so, Brenda undermined the access to general education instruction also embedded in student IEPs. By prioritizing one aspect of FAPE, another was eliminated. In a later interview, Brenda mentioned adjusting her schedule to prioritize specially designed instruction for one student over general education instruction for them in a specific time block: But I have three reading groups. So, I had to do one of the reading groups during the mini lesson and then share, I’ll circle back into the mini lesson with [the student]. Because where was I going to fit those reading groups? While Brenda tried to balance student access to the general education curriculum, she ultimately prioritized specially designed instruction. Observations of Brenda’s teaching confirmed her rationale. While she scheduled time in the morning for students to check in with her or work on instruction outside of the regular block, student attendance at these meetings varied. Consequently, the bulk of specially designed instruction took place during general education time. Greta started out the school year at Bradbury Elementary with a model that facilitated both general education access and specially designed instruction, though this design exceeded the district’s recommended maximum of two and a half hours of daily virtual school activities for students. However, she later prioritized special education service delivery in light of student attendance. As she described it: The beginning of the year, I was trying to do groups opposite what their whole group time is, I guess. So for example, if a student was in school from 8:30 to 10:30 doing their whole group instruction from the classroom teachers, I was trying to schedule their direct instruction in the afternoon to be opposite what they got. But what I was finding was that if I had a different time scheduled and a different link, there was maybe two out of ten kids that were actually coming to my extra groups, because…at seven and eight [years of age], it’s just hard to keep track of what time it is on your own. And I made schedules and stuff, but it was just not working. So, then I switched it to I was going to do my groups

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Helen Rose Miesner during their whole group time. And I figured out ways to do that, or just stay on their Zoom. Like in my morning group, I just stay on [after general education instruction ends] and do their reading group that way. So, I mean…that’s something that has changed, and that’s worked out better. I have way more participation that way.

Greta reported changing her practice over the course of the school year. Interestingly, this change related to compounded logistical complications. While Greta had the time to provide services outside of general education instruction, her students had a difficult time attending to instruction during that period. In observations, Greta continued working with students for an hour following the culmination of their group time to provide special education instruction. However, this time supplemented specially designed instruction that Greta provided in separate breakout rooms with students during general education time. Even though Greta and Brenda attempted to provide some level of instruction outside of general education classroom time, they lacked sufficient time to provide specially designed instruction without conflicting with students’ access to broader general education programming. This comparison shows how actors across scales address the provision of FAPE during the COVID-19 pandemic. As state and district actors added more details to the skeletal guidance provided at the federal level, FAPE in practice ultimately was replaced by specially designed instruction. Special education teachers, faced with time constraints for connecting with students virtually, prioritized the provision of special education services to students with disabilities, at the expense of general education instruction that federal and state level actors assert comprises part of FAPE. Consequently, though broadly defined at the federal level, special education teachers facing logistical constraints and mixed policy messages during the COVID-19 pandemic enacted an incomplete version of FAPE.

Discussion This study utilized the CCS approach to demonstrate how actors across scales approach FAPE. In addition to providing empirical data regarding FAPE, the study holds methodological implications for future CCS work. I detail these directions below, with attention to how they relate to the transversal, horizontal, and vertical axes of CCS. While some research employs the transversal axis to examine historical trends and policy development over periods of years, this study employed the transversal to understand policy within smaller time periods. In other words, I sought to understand how federal, state, and district messaging evolved over the course of the pandemic and how the pedagogical practices of Brenda and Greta changed during the 2020–21 school year. This application of transversal analysis highlighted the iterative nature of policy in

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practice, emphasizing its continuing dynamism owing to its interpretation by ground level actors. The horizontal axes of the CCS approach illuminated differences and provided a tool through which to challenge assumptions regarding processes and teachers’ consequent responses. By comparing the practices of Brenda with those of Greta, I was able to identify variances in practices that may have been taken for granted in a single school. These comparisons spurred me to examine the source of their variance, thus tracing the logic around FAPE across policy scales to identify areas of concordance and conflict. Further, horizontal comparison also fostered a more critical eye toward similar practices between teachers, urging consideration of why certain practices may be similar and if phenomena observed in study sites would appear in comparable contexts outside of the study. Yet, the methodological advantages of comparative work partially comprise its accompanying challenges. To compare, data collection requires observations and interviews of similar actors and of similar events; yet even in the most balanced attempts to data collection, one can only be in one space at one time. The challenges that appear as comparative researchers attempt to gather comparable data across sites and scale can therefore provide insight into the structures they wish to examine. In this study, I conducted several more interviews and hours of observations with staff at Bradbury, as compared to Thompson. Bradbury staff displayed more interest in my study and willingness to participate, in large part resulting from professional relationships we developed previously. While I could frame the unevenness of data collection as a validity problem, I instead recognize that the differential willingness of participants to engage with a study reflects important differences in perceptions of external research and capacity to engage in additional labor during the COVID-19 era. Consequently, comparing what data we can collect from sites can bolster analysis, presuming consistency in our recruiting efforts, as asymmetry regarding who participates and what they choose to share may highlight variances in organizational cultures and professional identities. Interestingly, data collection along the vertical axis was initially more focused on observations and interviews at the school level, but gradually became more focused on documents as the study moved to examine district, state, and federal levels. Again, this unevenness of data collection provided an opportunity to reflect on why different data sources lend themselves to the study of organizations that are variably positioned in the policy process. For example, whereas federal policy is codified in text, policy enactment at the teacher level is largely conveyed through practice. These varied sources yield differential opportunities to scrutinize policy in these spaces. Further, as discussed earlier, a researcher can only be in a single place at one time and must employ pragmatism when deciding whether to dive deeply into a single context or interrogate information across scales at a similar, albeit shallower, level. I chose the former to highlight the daily experiences of those charged

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with policy enactment; however, the latter can be fruitful for studies pursuing alternate questions. Finally, one of the largest challenges in CCS research is how to bound one’s focus. Those who hope for a tidy encapsulation of factors and entities can become overwhelmed by the fractal-like array of actors that the CCS approach demands. However, our decisions and justifications regarding who and what to include provide information in and of themselves. We can examine our research design for practical conveniences and personal biases, affordances, and constraints—all of which inform our findings and contribute to a thicker understanding of policy as practice.

Discussion Questions 1

2

3

Miesner argues that online education during the COVID-19 pandemic has resulted in a more restricted enactment of free and public education (FAPE) for U.S. students with disabilities than what was proposed in the Individuals with Disabilities in Education Improvement Act of 2004. How did her methods lead to this argument? What specific examples in the chapter most strongly support this argument? The author discusses the “unevenness” of her data collection over the course of her study, namely, that her data collection at the federal and state level relied on document analysis, whereas her data collection with teachers included interviews and observations. She also describes how that unevenness led to insights. What did she learn from the unevenness about policy and practice? Do you think it’s problematic to have richer data from one scale than from others in a CCS? Why or why not? What does Miesner’s analysis add to your understanding of the vertical axis of a comparative case study, including the challenges and potential of unevenness? What other methods might Miesner have used to address concerns about unevenness of data across scales?

Note 1 All names are pseudonyms.

References Ball, S. J., Maguire, M., & Braun, A. (2012). How schools do policy: Policy enactments in secondary schools. Routledge. Bartlett, L., & Vavrus, F. (2017). Rethinking case study research: A comparative approach. Routledge. Bettini, E., Crockett, J., Brownell, M., & Merrill, K. (2016). Relationships between working conditions and special educators’ instruction. The Journal of Special Education, 50(3), 178–190.

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Brandes, J. A., & Crowson, H. M. (2009). Predicting dispositions toward inclusion of students with disabilities: The role of conservative ideology and discomfort with disability. Social Psychology of Education, 12(2), 271–289. Braun, M. (2017). Little evidence and big consequences: Understanding special education voucher programs. Center on Education Policy. Bray, L. E., & Russell, J. L. (2018). The dynamic interaction between institutional pressures and activity: An examination of the implementation of IEPs in secondary inclusive settings. Educational Evaluation and Policy Analysis, 40(2), 243–266. Corbin, J., & Strauss, A. (2008). Basics of qualitative research (3rd ed.). Sage. Endrew F. v. Douglas County School District RE–1, 580 U.S. (2017). Ghere, G., & York-Barr, J. (2007). Paraprofessional turnover and retention in inclusive programs: Hidden costs and promising practices. Remedial and Special Education, 28, 21–32. Individuals with Disabilities Education Improvement Act, 20 U.S.C. § 1400. (2004). https:// sites.ed.gov/idea/statute-chapter-33/subchapter-i/1400. Kolbe, T. (2019). Funding special education: Charting a path that confronts complexity and crafts coherence. National Education Policy Center. http://nepc.colora do.edu/publication/special-ed. LeCompte, M. D., & Schensul, J. J. (2010). Designing and conducting ethnographic research. Altamira. Levinson, B., & Sutton, M. (2001). Policy as/in practice: Developing a sociocultural study of educational policy. In M. Sutton & B. Levison (Eds.), Policy as practice: Toward a comparative sociocultural analysis of educational policy (pp.1–22). Ablex. Merriam, S. B. (1998). Qualitative research and case study applications in education. Jossey-Bass. Miesner, H. R. (Forthcoming). Dynamic and static working conditions: Examining the work of special educators in a partially inclusive elementary school setting. The Educational Forum. Miles, M. B., Huberman, A. M., & Saldaña, J. (2014). Qualitative data analysis: A methods sourcebook (3rd ed.). Sage. National Council on Disability. (2018). Broken promises: The underfunding of IDEA. https://ncd.gov/sites/default/files/NCD_BrokenPromises_508.pdf. Ruppar, A. L., Allcock, H., & Gonsier-Gerdin, J. (2017). Ecological factors affecting access to general education content and contexts for student with significant disabilities. Remedial and Special Education, 38(1), 53–63. Ruppar, A. L., & Gaffney, J. (2011). Individualized education program team decisions: A preliminary study of conversations, negotiations, and power. Research and Practice for Persons with Severe Disabilities, 36(1). Ruppar, A. L., Gaffney, J. S., & Dymond, S. K. (2015). Influences on teachers’ decisions about literacy for secondary students with severe disabilities. Exceptional Children, 81(2), 209–226. Russell, J. L., & Bray, L. E. (2013). Crafting coherence from complex policy messages: Educators’ perceptions of special education and standards-based accountability policies. Education Policy Analysis Archives, 21(12), 1–22. Saldaña, J. (2016). The coding manual for qualitative researchers (3rd ed.). Sage. Sutcher, L., Darling-Hammond, L., & Carver-Thomas, D. (2016). A coming crisis in teaching? Teacher supply, demand, and shortages in the U.S. Learning Policy Institute.

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Timberlake, M. T. (2014). Weighing costs and benefits: Teacher interpretation and implementation of access to the general education curriculum. Research and Practice for Persons with Severe Disabilities, 39(2), 83–99. U.S. Department of Education. (2020, March 21-a). Supplemental fact sheet: Addressing the risk of COVID-19 in preschool, elementary and secondary schools while serving children with disabilities. https://www2.ed.gov/about/offices/list/ocr/frontpage/faq/rr/policyguidance. pdf. U.S. Department of Education. (2020, June 25-b). IDEA Part B Use of Funds. https:// sites.ed.gov/idea/files/qa-part-b-use-of-funds-06-25-2020.pdf. U.S. Department of Education. (2020, June 30-c). IDEA Part B Procedural Safeguards. https://sites.ed.gov/idea/files/qa-procedural-safeguards-idea-part-b-06-30-2020.pdf. U.S. Department of Education. (2020, September 28-d). IDEA Part B Service Provision. https://sites.ed.gov/idea/files/qa-provision-of-services-idea-part-b-09-28-2020.pdf. Voulgarides, C. K. (2018). Does compliance matter in special education?: IDEA and the hidden inequities of practice. Teachers College Press. Weatherly, R., & Lipsky, M. (1977). Street-level bureaucrats and institutional innovation: Implementing special-education reform. Harvard Educational Review, 47(2), 171–197.

Section IV

Addressing the Transversal Axis

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Beyond Permanence and Change Tracing the Transversal Axis of Community Development Elena Toukan

Introduction Are the social sciences today better equipped to deal with the fundamental problems, or, on the contrary, are they still forgetting them systematically? And if such forgetting still goes on, what should be done in the next few decades to put an end to it? Boaventura de Souza Santos, Epistemologies of the South (2015, p. 70)

When my co-researchers and I entered the first site that would ultimately be woven into my dissertation research, we knew implicitly that time would matter. We had been invited for the purpose of program evaluation for a newly established school for the communities of Chiloé, Chile, and temporality was baked into the measurement framework of the change that we were there to evaluate and observe. The five-year span between the point of project design and the time of research had yielded undeniable results: A school now stood where it previously had not; faculty members were developing and teaching curriculum; students were attending courses; communities were participating in workshops and events. But what I could not have anticipated is how little those five years would matter in comparison with other significations of time—through community memory, cycles of collective action, and intergenerational vision—that the Indigenous communities involved would bring to our attention. And more significantly, I could not have anticipated how differently a transversal comparison of the school under study could be read depending on whose perspectives of time were accounted for in the research framework. This chapter examines insights that arose from the application of the transversal axes in my dissertation research, conducted in 2017–18, in the context of a broader comparative case study (CCS) that examined the unique roles that communities play in addressing questions of education and development. I look at the transversal axes in both sites in this chapter, to highlight the multiple and differing ways that time comes to bear on each case, highlighting the complexity of culturally responsive research. The first site of my research was in the Indigenous territories of southern Chile and the DOI: 10.4324/9781003216551-8

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second in the peri-urban communities of Bangui in the Central African Republic. My original study in Chile expanded to include another program evaluation that I participated in later in the year in the Central African Republic. The two cases had in common a focus on understanding how communities in each site envision and pursue their own paths of education and collective well-being, while at the same time navigating external influences, pressures, and support. They also shared a common significant point in time—each was coming to the end of a five-year funded project with support from partners in the global North. And yet, while the premise of my research involvement was based inescapably on this temporal significance, I also had to recognize that a point in the project might not be as significant temporally to the local communities, in comparison to any other moment—their lives and experiences extended long before, and would continue long after the spotlight of this research. I had to expand my understanding of transversal process, movement, and change in a way that was on the terms of the local participants in place of my own—or even in place of their funders. The transversal axis of this study helped me to probe and shed light on these dilemmas. The CCS approach, as described by Bartlett and Vavrus (2017), goes beyond a rejection of positivism’s certainty of a single objective narrative that can be precisely reconstructed. In this chapter I build on their discussion of “tracing of the transversal” to further consider the question of how time and spaces are themselves produced through colonial processes, and how CCS research can lead to new insights by broadening the boundaries of what is considered comparable and questioned. Specific to my research, I highlight insights that emerge from such a transversal reading, broadened to the multiple and decolonizing readings of time. These insights were pivotal to my research findings, which showed how communities can arise as protagonists on their own paths of education and development. This chapter begins with a discussion of the conceptual and practical underpinnings of my study, before moving into an explanation of how I used the CCS approach along all three axes. I highlight the specific use of the transversal, with examples from research. I conclude with a discussion of the methodological implications of my research for future transversal case study research, particularly in relation to community research in education.

Contested Conceptualizations of Development, Time, and Change The dominating international social and economic development models of the 20th century have a positivist relationship with time. Rostow’s (1960) five-stage economic growth model, for example, charted a linear path for countries to move from “traditional society” to “take off” and ultimately to become “society of high mass consumption.” Time in this sense is linear and unidirectional—societies move from the “backward” past to the unlimited and ever-expanding economic growth of the future (Wagner, 2018). Yet,

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though the effects of these theories over the past 60 years proved to marginalize entire populations, to increase inequality at alarming rates, and to accelerate environmental degradation and disaster under heavy industrial development, their assumptions continue to predominate (Escobar, 2011). Modernist development paradigms remain stuck in their unidirectional lane, spinning their wheels indefinitely as they await the presumed next stop in a path to mass consumption and unlimited economic growth, which has yet to arrive. The modernist narrative of development freezes time, with “developed” and “developing” countries and “mature” and “emerging” economies locked in as permanent adjectives applied to development narrative, policy, and gatekeeping. Certainly, linear positivist development has received powerful criticism from all sides, giving rise to intellectual and activist communities around post-development, Southern studies, and decolonization (e.g., Escobar, 2011; Fanon, 2007; Freire, 2000; Quijano, 2007). Yet, global rankings and hierarchies remain dominant, valued as much for their hegemonic ease of narrative as for the global movement of capital, and ever seeking the attractive conditions of “emerging” markets for inexpensive labor and raw materials. Nonetheless, the potency of development critiques should not be underestimated, and their power can be found both in the characteristics of their own movements, as well as in the ways in which they slowly and steadily seep into the mainstream, challenging their hegemony down to their epistemological roots. This is especially the case with the insights, critiques, and alternatives gleaned from Indigenous worldviews, post-colonialism, and movements from the global South. From an academic point of view, many such movements have been categorized by what they reject—post-colonial refusals of Eurocentric domination or post-modern deconstructions of hegemonic signs and symbols—or else subsumed through association with sympathetic intellectual trends—critical and Marxist theorizations that deconstruct social power, labor economics, and systemic oppression (Walsh, 2012).1 Yet, insights from these movements draw from deep wells of knowledge, epistemology, ontology, and metaphysics that span millennia, predating colonial occupation and the European Enlightenment, and responding to new exigencies (de Souza Santos, 2015). The measurement of change and time through clocks and calendars has long existed in virtually every society. However, their standardization has been fraught with contention. Our modern relationship with timekeeping has been shaped by the transformational forces of the 19th and 20th centuries—in particular, industrialization, colonialism, and the rise of the global capitalist economy (Ogle, 2015; Smith, 2013). As taken for granted as the 24hour clock, 12-month calendar, and coordinated global time zones are today, standardized and simultaneous time division is a relatively recent human invention. The adoption of international standards can be seen as liberating when viewed as a means to enhance communication and coordination of

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humanity’s increasingly interconnected systems and processes. Yet, the objectivity and force with which standardized and simultaneous time has been introduced has come with significant local consequences. In her book The Global Transformation of Time, Vanessa Ogle (2015) illustrates in vivid detail the role of European empire building in suppressing local patterns of life in order to expand colonial power, accelerate the economic gains of trade and marketization, and increase the reach of the church. Colonial labor regimes, schooling, and standards led to a wave of protests in the early 20th century in the struggle between local and imperial time. For example, she writes: Conflicts over time moreover emerged from variations in notation and computation. The Zulus in the British Natal Colony followed the moon and the stars in calculating the month and divided the year into thirteen moons. One circuit lasts for about twenty-eight days after which an interlunary period followed, a moonless period during which people paid respect to the darkness and abstained from work… Besides employers, it was above all colonial missionaries who longed to convert indigenous populations to Christian routines and rituals… By exporting their methods of organizing the flow and the use of time, missionaries intervened deeply in indigenous languages and imaginations. (Ogle, 2015, p. 93) While the standardization of time has proved to be an essential technology for the coordination of travel, communication, and transactions, it should not be imagined that local and Indigenous conceptualizations of time have become irrelevant or lost. Many of us follow multiple calendars simultaneously—faith communities mark the start of the new year and commemorate moments of significance; words and names given to specific times, periods, cycles, and epochs denote understandings of peoples’ histories; and languages, cultures, and practices correspond to rhythms of the physical environment and cosmos. How does an understanding of modern time relate to studying the transversal axis of a comparative case study? In my study, each case has been deeply impacted by the logics and effects of colonialism and global capitalism, which carry their own divisions of time and space. These impacts look different in each context, with different colonial experiences in Latin America and Central Africa. By drawing from Indigenous, decolonizing, and Southern studies in my theoretical framework, it was important to ensure that the methodological lens of my research was conceptually consistent. The failure of research and social theory to question the assumption of linear, simultaneous, and objective time has resulted in numerous misunderstandings and misrepresentations of social activity, organization, and conceptualization. Achille Mbembe (2001) makes the point that Western social research has been inadequate for understanding the complexity of interconnections in its

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notions of time: “Social theory has failed also to account for time as lived, not synchronically or diachronically, but in its multiplicity and simultaneities, its presence and absences, beyond the lazy categories of permanence and change beloved of so many historians” (p. 8, emphasis in the original). Numerous anthropologists were foundational to the myth that the peoples and groups they encountered had no concept of time, or that their sense of time was rudimentary and inaccurate. Many of these claims were symptomatic of researchers’ own limitations, unable to transcend narrow understandings of time and change. Linda Tuhiwai Smith (2013), furthermore, argues that many Indigenous languages and cultures do not differentiate between space and time in the same ways that these concepts have been fragmented in European language and epistemologies. Throughout my career in community development and education, I saw the incommensurability of development theories and timelines assigned to projects from the “time as lived” of local communities. In addition to drawing from Indigenous, decolonizing, and Southern studies, my study was also interested in exploring the collective dimensions of agency in ways that differ from those of individuals and institutions. I thus also sought insights from the field of community studies about conceptualizing time and change. “Community time” is described by Crow and Allen (1995) as an important dimension through which to understand the pattern of relationships and change in communities. They write: The notion of “community time” embodies the idea that community relationships are patterned over time, and that involvement in these relationships is not simply a matter of individual choice. Community time is marked most explicitly by infrequent symbolic rituals, but it is also acknowledged in the rhythms of everyday interaction between community members. (p. 156) Time is casually invoked when talking about a community with regards to notions of “traditional” and “modern” communities. Romanticizing or idealizing historical communities as somehow more “authentic” has been strongly criticized by social scientists, who point out pervasive social inequalities in past societies, particularly along lines of gender and race (Knijn & Komter, 2004; Lister, 1997). To question the linear narrative of chronology and progress is not to invoke a return to the past, but rather to seek connections in cycles of disconnect in order to trace an alternate narrative. Another important dynamic of community time is the effects of memory on the meanings, structures, and relationships to place. Bellah (1996) refers to this as community of memory, which can draw strength from the aims and aspirations of the past in the present (Bellah et al., 1996; Crow, 2002). Community time, memory, history, and change are not only important for appreciating the social processes of the past, but also for tracing

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possibilities for the future. De Souza Santos (2015) makes the important point that how the past is considered risks impacting what is imagined for the future, in what he refers to as “an equation of roots and options” (p. 76). For society to imagine a modernist range of options, for example, its roots were required to mirror conceptions of the nature of identity and change beginning with the European Enlightenment. Similarly, in the two cases in my study, how each school’s origin is understood in the past shapes the sense of agency and power that the community sees itself in employing to write the future.

The Community as a Protagonist: Study, Methods, and Key Findings Briefly summarized, the central aim of my study was to understand the ways in which education and development unfold to reflect local communities’ aspirations.2 While community schools, community-based education, and interactions between school and their constituent communities have long been studied and discussed, communities have predominantly been assigned to supporting or contextual roles, valued for engagement and buy-in. Drawing from a notion of “community” as more than the sum of its composite parts, capable of aspiring, envisioning, and exercising agency over time, I designed my study to explore how communities can be understood as protagonists in their own right. Community is often a difficult concept—notably, “so vague, that its critical role, even in making opportunity possible, is obscured” (Bellah, 1997, p. 387). Community defies rigid categorization and typologies. Formally declared and recognizable membership is but one facet of a recognizable community, yet often it is among the least important to those who identify with it. An important undertaking of my study, therefore, was to sufficiently articulate the characteristics of community within the context of my research. Crow and Allen (1994) theorize four “dimensions” of community that mutually interact: community place (e.g., geographically situatedness or spatial reference points), community structures (e.g., bonds, systems, and processes), community meanings (e.g., identity, shared language, and boundary making), and community time (e.g., collective memory and histories). While Crow and Allen (1994) provide a helpful starting point for thinking about communities’ dynamic and interacting facets, their proposed dimensions theorize the life of the community as somewhat passive. I therefore further identified the powers of a community to exercise active agency in envisioning and undertaking deliberate collective action as an additional dimension for analysis. I suggest communities’ agency to be particularly necessary in analyzing the community as a protagonist, in this case in the domains of development and education. In discussing these dimensions and the vantage point of community, I drew on a wide range of disciplines, philosophies, and traditions, including those mentioned in the previous section from Indigenous, decolonizing, and Southern studies perspectives.

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Cases, Contexts, and Methods While community can be used to describe both territorial and non-territorially bounded groups, for the purposes of this research I consider community to be the intermediary structures and interlocking social networks of geographic proximity, such as in a village or neighborhood (Crow & Allen, 2014). I further drew on Theodori’s (2005) description of community as “a place-oriented process of interrelated actions through which members of a local population express a shared sense of identity while engaging in the common concerns of life” (pp. 662–663). These definitions informed my choice of two research sites, in Chile and the Central African Republic, where people embraced conceptions of community action and identity that were conducive to further exploration. The overarching focus of this study is on the ways in which these two local communities acted as protagonists through the development of schools. Case A was a project in the Indigenous territories in Chiloé, southern Chile. Through years of systemic repression, compounded by neoliberal policies that privatized much of the education system, Chile’s reputation as having “the most segregated educational system” in the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD; Cabalin, 2012, p. 220) has been especially harmful to Indigenous communities. The Indigenous communities in the Southern archipelago of Chiloé developed a unique school that engaged Indigenous and non-Indigenous youth with knowledge that reflected local exigencies and conditions. Case B was a network of community schools in the Central African Republic (CAR). After many cycles of civil war and violence, the CAR has remained at the bottom of the Human Development Index (HDI), unmoved for decades (UNDP, 2019). Over the five years of the project, community schools more than doubled through the efforts of families, local leaders, and groups of parents and neighbors, with the support of a CAR-based nongovernmental organization (NGO). Both sites were concluding five-year development projects with the financial support of partners in the Global North––Canada in the case of Chile, and Luxembourg in the case of the CAR.

Participatory Data Collection and Analysis This study employed participatory methodologies that were congruent with my conceptual framing of the community as an active agent of learning and action. Since the objective of this research is to understand how different participants conceptualize and articulate the realization of their collective aspirations in education and development projects, I would find it unfathomable to consider a methodology for achieving this objective that is not, in itself, participatory. What participatory meant in this context was that the research objectives, protocols, and data collection plans were designed with a group of participant researchers within each site, drawing on input from

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the organization and their partners, to develop a collective reading of reality that could extend data collection further to local communities than I would have been able to achieve on my own. As a White researcher from Canada, I made it essential that my presence be welcomed in and seen as beneficial for each community’s own intentions. In Chile, the research team included myself alongside a professor and a fellow doctoral student from the University of Toronto, both of whom identify as Latinx, and ten teachers and students of the Indigenous school. In the CAR, I was the sole external researcher alongside ten teachers and coordinators of community schools. After initial research design workshops in each context, we selected visual and oral participatory methods that could help to generate individual and collective reflection from different angles. Methods included community maps and focus groups, self-portrait interviews, and photovoice workshops. Community mapping—a process of collectively creating large-scale, visual representations of spaces and times significant to a community or group—was especially generative for reflections on the ways in which shared identifications, experiences, meaning-making, memories, and geographies were articulated and negotiated.

Comparative Analysis While this chapter focuses primarily on the transversal axis, I drew on all three axes as described by Bartlett and Vavrus (2017): The horizontal axis, identifying differences between geographic cases; the vertical, identifying the interrelated multiple scales of influence in which cases are embedded; and the transversal, identifying the historical situatedness of processes and relations. I considered the CCS framework particularly well suited to community research, since the conventional “bounded” notion of a case would do a disservice to collective experiences that are by nature process-oriented and holistic (e.g., Stake, 1995; Yin, 2016). I applied the horizontal axis to draw connections and juxtapositions across heterogeneous experiences. I analyzed the vertical axis to unpack the policy and relational dynamics of each case, from transnational funders to local actors. I examined the transversal axis to explore the historical situatedness of processes and relationships in each case; however, it was here that I had to step back from a conventional academic historicism to question the very nature of time and change according to terms that the communities themselves described. Bartlett and Vavrus (2017) describe the transversal axis as a comparison that historically situates the processes or relations under consideration, through a perception of change over time. Over the course of my research, I further came to recognize that the question of which and whose history, and what meanings of change and time are operating, must themselves first be addressed before meaningful comparison can occur. Perceptions and relationships with time are themselves historically situated and produced, impacting how I analyzed the transversal axis in my dissertation

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research. In what follows, I illustrate key examples of how such a perspective manifested in the context of my research. Example 1: Contested Points of Origin In the Chilean case, multiple perspectives about the starting point of the Indigenous school led to substantively different views about its effects and consequences in the local communities that it serves. The school was officially founded about six years ago, accredited in the midst of a grant from the Government of Canada to promote education and development for vulnerable Indigenous youth. After some time, however, chiefs and community leaders insisted that my fellow researchers and I be clear in our understanding that the achievement of the school had been long foreseen by their ancestors, at the height of repression of their peoples during the Pinochet dictatorship in the 1970s and throughout the years of colonial oppression prior. As one member shared with us: We didn’t start a project and then seek out financial support. Rather, it is the continuation of a process that goes back 30 years. It has been a dynamic and dialectic process… It materialized and became a concrete reality because of systematic and hard work over the course of years, in conjunction with the Council of Chiefs who oriented the project towards the educational sphere. This must be viewed as part of a larger context… Its inception was just another phase in this process. In a focus group, Indigenous teachers created a map with a timeline that extended around the back of the paper. Their visual map marked a timeline that is not linear but circular in its illustration of how time moves in relation to the Indigenous school. An Indigenous teacher described the significance of the circular timeline: The timeline begins 6,000 years ago and goes forward, and it shows where we are at this particular moment in time. In this moment, we view [the Indigenous school] as a tool towards autonomy. The community has said they will use it as an educational tool, for our own education, on our own terms—which again is one of the biggest strengths of [the school]—in order to construct the type of development that we see fit. We know that things have happened over the course of time that amount to cultural imposition. As a result, the people independently arrived at the conclusion that what they need is a type of education that will serve their needs… Our view of sustainable development is a vision across time, and represents the development of something that is under construction of the present moment. In another instance, the local Indigenous partners were criticized by their funders for taking too long to carry out certain objectives that were present

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in the project’s design. They were then instructed to end the project early, informed that Canada would not complete the funding that had been promised. In response, one Indigenous director shared: At a certain point in time, we were told that we were not meeting the criteria set out in the PMF [Performance Measurement Framework], so we cross-referenced the work we had accomplished with what was already in the PMF. We checked everything off—everything—and sent it away. That’s when they realized that we were not thieves—that we had been able to accomplish the task. The temporal language of being “behind” echoes the development language of “backwardness” that pits tradition in contrast to modernity, and removes Indigenous peoples from association with the present (Smith, 2013). Performance measurement in this context sets arbitrary indicators that often have little relevance to the origins and significance of the project from the perspective of the community. At the same time, the measurement creates conditions to determine and punish constituents for being “behind” when compared to project metrics, regardless of how appropriate they may be to the vision of the community in the first place. Likewise, the temporal connotations of being “behind” or “off target” further impose and entrench what Smith (2013) refers to as Western categories of thought on the social organization of the lives and priorities of the constituent actors. Example 2: Change Over Cycles of Crisis and Hope In the conflict-affected context of the Central African Republic (CAR), the narrative of progress that modernization theory so often relies upon has appeared especially futile due to the many setbacks that occur with each new outbreak of violence. There is a saying among the residents of the CAR that their country falls into conflict every seven to ten years. In each wave of conflict, schools have been among the first targets for burning, looting, and re-purposing as militant headquarters. These continuous patterns of conflict and peace reflect an ongoing tension within international aid discourses that draw a stark division between development, which is assumed to be long-term and lasting, and humanitarian work, which is presumed to be short-term emergency relief. When the “emergency” never ends, what kind of “development” can be fathomed? For the many communities around the associated community schools, a linear notion of progress is equally senseless. And yet time and life “as lived” (Mbembe, 2001) does not—cannot—stop. This perspective of ongoing social activity has enabled communities to find ways to provide for their own education and well-being, even when formal government institutions grind to a halt. The Central African directors of the CAR-based NGO that supports the schools describe that they see cycles of crisis and victory as inevitable in the long-term work of social change.

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One director, Alain, explained that when the project was set to begin around 2012, the civil conflict especially affected certain regions. After that point, some schools were able to reopen once it was safe to return to their homes and communities. Others had not yet been able to re-open due to the continued regional conflicts. Many community schools avoided closing even during the violence by employing teachers from the communities themselves who could continue to hold their classes with little direct support from external structures. This capacity for flexibility and adaptability would later serve them well in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic. When all schools had to shut in April 2020, parents and teachers were able to organize micro-level écoles décentralisées around each household. Even when schools were closed, education continued. Despite the conflict, the organization saw great opportunity in these grassroots efforts to challenge the failing systems their country inherited from French colonialism. Another director, M. Yves, described: Our culture became a combination of African culture and Western culture during the colonial period…and community trust began to disappear when parents were forced to send the children to school. The first schools, we called them the “l’école des blancs,” that is to say, the school of foreigners. And so, from there our own values started to be lost. Because with les blancs education, we saw a change of mentality, because the curriculum also conveyed their culture. So, the child who went to school ended up at the crossroads of two cultures. Alain described this catalytic potential of a school in a community as “framework for development” and “a center of light,” from which numerous processes of community life––agriculture, food security, family health, environmental protection—can arise from education, as capacity is built over time. The notion of a long-term vision of change unfolding over cycles of both crisis and stability relied on a clear-eyed perspective of history and a future that could see beyond the linear narrative of progress. Future possibilities reject the limited colonial “roots” and the options that they have to offer as a narrative of progress. Many donor countries are precluded from working in so-called “failed” or “fragile states”—as if the progression of development, change, and time is simply on hold, waiting for the clock to start over. But “time as lived” (Mbembe, 2001) continues through communities’ creative responses to crises, and envisioning their own possible futures regardless of present or future crises that are bound to descend.

Discussion: Using CCS to Generate New Theoretical Directions At the heart of the transversal axis is change over time. Bartlett and Vavrus (2017) indicate how the axis of change potentially mobilizes the other

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two—change can occur both horizontally as well as vertically. In my analyses, I identified expressions of community agency within two cases; tracing the transversal axis in each of them brought a deeper sense of understanding of such agency than I would have discerned within the limited constructs of “participation” and “buy-in” in the present. The notions of “community memory” and “community time,” for example (Bellah, 2008; Crow & Allan, 1995), can be observed, on one hand, as merely a function of sharing values, memories, and narratives across cycles and generations through collective transmission. Passively, this shared memory could be perceived to have little consequence outside of specific meanings attributed to the members of the group. However, when considered in the context of action, I suggest that shared memory is a unique feature of communities that can enable the active pursuit of a course of action over a much longer time horizon than could be achieved by individuals, or even by many institutions. My study illustrates how communities’ span and duration of time are different from individuals’. Community memory thus strengthens collective action over longer time horizons to potentially greater effect than is possible in the limited duration of an individual’s life. Crow and Allan (1995) argue that the dimension of community time increases opportunities to strengthen and deepen collective bonds. Findings from the cases in this study, however, go further than bonding to illustrate how the community operates as a protagonist over time by sustaining vision and volition across generations. For example, it was noteworthy in Case A to observe how present the words, vision, and guidance of previous generations were in the actions of the present. Carrying forward the endeavors that were initiated decades before by elders who were no longer living was as urgent in the present as it was 40 years ago, indicating the continuity of Indigenous education. In both cases, community ownership is passed down through time, further developed, and bolstered with a sense of the significance of communities’ own time in history and a strengthened sense of identity, justice, and analysis of historical and present crisis and oppression. Implications for CCS As a researcher using CCS, I became aware that the way in which I reinforce and entrench certain historical narratives can have implications for how agency and ownership are attributed in the context of the case study. I had to continually question—who are the protagonists in this historical narrative? How might I be reproducing histories skewed towards those with resources and power? Which histories, relationships, and social experiences are present by virtue of their measurability and perceived productivity, and which might be absent? Similarly important is the methodological temporality that I inhabited as the researcher, as the otherwise arbitrary moment when data collection takes place may not be meaningful to the community.

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The power of engaging the transversal axis in CCS-based community research rests not only in analyzing historical contexts and descriptions of change, but also in questioning the nature of temporality outside of researchers’ taken-for-granted assumptions of the significance of temporal categories. The CCS approach helps to provide the tools to bring in this axis, to question conflicting perspectives and narratives, in seeing the past as a living participant in present and future possibilities (de Souza Santos, 2014). CCS researchers can further consider ways that time is imagined, signified, and operationalized, both in the experiences of those who participate, as well as the broader epistemological contexts to which they are connected. My study demonstrates the value of a historical genealogy of education, curriculum, and pedagogy and its relationship to the community. Much documented history about the development of education in Central Africa and South America begins from the point of colonialism, including only generalized ahistorical accounts from precolonial times about informal traditional forms of education. Educational historians can research what can be understood about educational processes in relation to social roles and values, systems of knowledge, social and economic relationships, spiritual knowledge, and so on, to put contemporary educational processes in their historical contexts. The present, familiar, institutional forms of education, which create a sharp separation between “school” and “community,” are not the only models available in the history of a given place or people. This is not about a return to a past, or a reification of the modern/traditional binaries of education, but rather an enrichment of the genealogy of knowledge about the community’s role in educational processes, beyond the presentism of contemporary educational modes. Such inquiries should not be limited to academic historians, but rather grassroots and community historians should be among the primary investigators of those transversal accounts that pertain to their own communities. Likewise, I found it important to account for the stark differences between the way coloniality has historically operated and is experienced in Chile and the CAR. Post-independence colonial contexts differ with respect to their internal colonialism, the human rights status and sovereignty of Indigenous inhabitants, and ongoing patterns of power and dependency with historical colonial relationships. Comparative research that takes these similarities and differences into account can help refine understanding about creating the conditions and raising community capacity, and where priority might be afforded at a given time. For example, the priority of resurgence and retrieval of ancestral knowledge in certain contexts like Chiloé may be different from the priority of creating a network of resilient community-based institutions in the case of a society undergoing conflict, as in the case of CAR. Learning more about expressions of community agency in comparative contexts can add greater nuance to different and similar approaches that can be learned from and localized as fits a given situation (Bartlett & Vavrus, 2017).

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Conclusion An embrace of the transversal axis is, in part, an act of redress for the failings of the social sciences to adequately appreciate the conditions that give rise to social problems over time. What is required, however, is a probing of the understanding of time itself—and whether social science research is in fact equipped to sufficiently account for them. To the chiefs, elders, community leaders, and educations who spoke to me in this research, this transversal sense of time, of future, of origin, of ancestry, matters deeply. If researchers believe that the project begins with a set of funds and experts coming from elsewhere, local youth, children, families, and communities will always see the project’s ownership as belonging outside of their people. But if they can see their school as the culmination of their ancestors’ visions and efforts of decades past, or as charting a new future, the centrality of their role as protagonists in their community’s path of education, well-being, and development is respected and reinforced. Collective action and community agency are not only expressed over space but also over time. The premise of this chapter is that the transversal axis has great potential in comparative case study methods—indeed, I would suggest that is no longer possible to consider the past dead or irrelevant in any serious case study today. Comparison along this axis can occur in many ways—comparing different temporal moments in a common experience, comparing alternate or competing narratives, or drawing on historical contexts of cases undergoing vertical and historical comparison, to name a few. But this chapter also carries a warning: How researchers trace the transversal runs the risk of entrenching certain evidence or narratives at the expense of others. As illustrated in examples from my research, I argue for an approach to time and change that questions these assumptions. Assumptions about time and change can be as hegemonic and ubiquitous as commonly used language about development and progress on one hand, or as intimate and deliberate as memory and identity on the other. The notion of a taken-for-granted linear progression of time was not the only (or most appropriate) way to think about history in my study, and I suspect that other researchers tracing the transversal axis might also find value in unpacking notions of time and change.

Discussion Questions 1

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Toukan argues that scholars need to pay more attention to local conceptions of time, and to assumptions about time itself in development discourses and practice. What evidence did she marshal to support these arguments and the one that transversal comparison may need to be reconsidered? Did you agree with her argument? Why or why not? What do you think of Toukan’s decision to compare two very different and seemingly unrelated cases? Does her decision and her resulting analysis change your notion of comparison in any way? If so, how?

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In your prospective research, what understandings of time and change over time do you use? Would you investigate participants’ ways of thinking about time and change, and if so, how? This may include considerations of meaningful instances of “time as lived” (e.g., cycles, seasons, patterns, simultaneity, and multiplicity) that go beyond clocks and calendars as seen in Toukan’s chapter. How, and when, will you put your fundamental assumptions about social phenomena “at risk” in your study so as to avoid entrenching certain historical narratives? How will you take into account participants’ understandings or views and use those to modify your methods or analyses?

Notes 1 Conflating movements has also been strategic from a political point of view, for example, labeling legitimate claims for autonomy and self-determination as extreme socialism or communism has been a common tactic for military and political intervention in sovereign states across the 20th century, across parts of Latin America, Africa, and Asia. 2 The full dissertation study titled In Search of Community: A Comparative Case Study of Education-for-Development and Local Community Ownership in Chile and Central Africa (Toukan, 2020) can be found at https://tspace.library.utoronto.ca/handle/ 1807/103354.

References Bartlett, L., & Vavrus, F. K. (2017). Rethinking case study research: A comparative approach. Routledge. Bellah, R. N. (1997). The necessity of opportunity and community in a good society. International Sociology, 12(4), 387–393. https://doi.org/10.1177/026858097012004001. Bellah, R. N., Madsen, R., Sullivan, W. M., Widler, A., & Tipton, S. M. (1993). The good society. Journal of Leisure Research, 25(1), 100–109. Cabalin, C. (2012). Neoliberal education and student movements in Chile: Inequalities and malaise. Policy Futures in Education, 10(2), 219–228. Crow, G. P., & Allan, G. (1995). Community types, community typologies and community time. Time & Society, 4(2), 147–166. https://doi.org/10.1177/ 0961463X95004002001. de Souza Santos, B. (2015). Epistemologies of the south: Justice against epistemicide. Routledge. Escobar, A. (2011). Encountering development: The making and unmaking of the Third World. Princeton University Press. Fanon, F. (2007). The wretched of the earth. Grove/Atlantic, Inc. (Original work published 1963) Freire, P. (2000). Pedagogy of the oppressed. Bloomsbury. (Original work published 1970) Knijn, T., & Komter, A. E. (2004). Solidarity between the sexes and the generations: Transformations in Europe. Edward Elgar Publishing. Lister, R. (1997). Citizenship: Towards a feminist synthesis. Feminist Review, 57(1), 28–48. https://doi.org/10.1080/014177897339641.

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Mbembe, A. (2001). On the postcolony. University of California Press. Ogle, V. (2015). The global transformation of time: 1870–1950. Harvard University Press. Quijano, A. (2007). Coloniality and modernity/rationality. Cultural Studies, 21(2–3), 168– 178. Rostow, W. W. (1960). The stages of economic growth: A non-Communist manifesto. Cambridge University Press. Smith, L. T. (2013). Decolonizing methodologies: Research and indigenous peoples. Zed Books Ltd. Stake, R. E. (1995). The art of case study research. Sage. Theodori, G. L. (2005). Community and community development in resource-based areas: Operational definitions rooted in an interactional perspective. Society & Natural Resources, 18(7), 661–669. https://doi.org/10.1080/08941920590959640. Toukan, E. (2020). In search of community: A comparative case study of education-fordevelopment and local community ownership in Chile and Central Africa. [Doctoral dissertation, OISE/University of Toronto]. TSpace Repository. UNDP. (2019). 2019 Human development index ranking. Human Development Report. http://hdr.undp.org/en/content/2019-human-development-index-ranking. Wagner, D. A. (2018). Learning as development: Rethinking international education in a changing world. Routledge. Walsh, C. (2012). “Other” knowledges,“ other” critiques: Reflections on the politics and practices of philosophy and decoloniality in the“ other” America. Transmodernity, 1(3), 11–27. Yin, R. K. (2017). Case study research and applications: Design and methods. Sage.

8

The Evolving Discourses of Suzhi and Suzhi Education A CCS Approach to the Study of Rural and Migrant Children in China Jingjing Lou

Introduction The 2020 census in China revealed that urban residents now account for 64% of the total population, compared to 50% in 2010 and 21% in 1981. The internal migrant population accounts for 26% of the total Chinese population, or 376 million people—a 70% increase since 2010.1 In 2015, more than 38% of the total number of children in China were affected by internal migration, including 3.43 million migrant children (aged 0–17) who moved to the city with their parents, and more than four million children left behind in rural areas when their parents moved to work in cities (UWCCW, NBS, & UNICEF, 2018, p. 138). With such a rapid process of urbanization and continuous growth of internal migration in China over the past four decades, educational inequities between children in urban and rural settings, and between urban and migrant children in urban areas, persist and are expanding. While access to education for rural children has improved over the last two decades thanks to policies such as free compulsory education for all (Lou & Ross, 2008), rural students continue to lag behind their urban counterparts in academic attainment (Chung & Mason, 2012; Guo et al., 2020; Hao et al., 2014; Lou, 2011). For example, while the official aggregated primary school dropout rate in China is only 0.2%, the cumulative dropout rate of rural students in less developed regions such as Northwest China can be as high as 8.2% (Lu et al., 2016). Migrant children struggle with access to free and quality education in the cities due to hukou (household registration system), which differentiates education, healthcare, and social security benefits between urban and rural residents, and essentially categorizes rural and migrant citizens as second-class citizens by limiting their access to quality social services, including education (Yeung & Buckingham, 2008). Megacities, such as Beijing, deliberately limit migrant children’s access to quality education to discourage migrant workers from staying in order to control the size of the population and regulate who can become citizens in these metropolitan areas (Chen et al., 2015; Yu & Crowley, 2020).

DOI: 10.4324/9781003216551-9

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This chapter draws on longitudinal studies I conducted with rural middle school students in Northwest China from 2005 to 2012 and with migrant middle school students in eastern China from 2015 to 2019. Multi-sited studies comparing rural, migrant, and even urban children are scarce (Xiang, 2020). Most scholars focus on either rural or migrant children due to their different locations in rural or urban regions, unless they are studying migrant children returning to the countryside from the city (Démurger & Xu, 2015; Koo et al., 2014). These studies often emphasize the unique challenges faced by rural youth, such as the urban-rural inequity in resource distribution that contributes to the rural-urban achievement gap (Guo et al., 2020; Hao et al., 2014). They also tend to focus on how hukou negatively affects migrant children’s access to and experiences in urban schooling. Research on migrant children has also focused on urban discrimination, segregation in urban schools, migrant children’s psychological issues, or neglect of children by their migrant parents (Goodburn, 2009; Lu & Zhou, 2013; Wang & Zhou, 2016; Xiang et al., 2017). The existing literature tends to treat migrant and rural children as two separate groups. Yet, due to rapid urbanization and frequent internal migration in China, neither rural nor migrant are fixed identities. Those children who initially left their rural homes may become migrant children when they join their parents in the cities; similarly, migrant children may become so-called returnee children when their parents send them back to their rural homes to gain access to academic high schools. Drawing on two longitudinal studies that investigate suzhi (quality) and suzhi education, I compare the schooling experiences of rural and migrant children who live in different places over time. Such comparison allows one to accurately trace how rapid urbanization processes have greatly shifted the rural and urban landscape of education in China. Instead of bounding cases in one location or with one particular group of people, this chapter utilizes the comparative case study (CCS) approach (Bartlett & Vavrus, 2017a). This approach is a particularly good fit for this study as rapid urbanization in China has displaced many children, literally and metaphorically. Their present location no longer determines the more complex and constantly shifting context between the rural and urban spaces that has shaped their identity development and education experiences. Migrant, rural (left behind or returning), and urban children are no longer separate categories with distinct boundaries. This realization calls for new forms of comparison and analysis. My study traces how suzhi (素质, quality) and suzhi education (素质教育, quality education) have been implemented, interpreted, and modified by various education stakeholders across different groups of children and across different times and places, situating the phenomenon of suzhi in the complex context of urbanization, neoliberalism, and social stratification in China. The analysis in this chapter challenges the narrow urban-rural dichotomy often prevalent in literature about rural and migrant children and sheds lights on a fundamental shift of missions and values embedded in education in today’s China.

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In the remainder of this chapter, after a review of existing literature on the definitions, contexts, and goals of suzhi and suzhi education in China, I examine how the meanings of the two concepts have evolved and changed across different times and places in my two longitudinal studies about rural and migrant children. I conclude with implications to enrich theories regarding suzhi and suzhi education, studies of rural and migrant children, and longitudinal research using the CCS approach.

Suzhi, Suzhi Education, and the Rural-Urban Divide in China A key linkage connecting the two longitudinal studies is the concept and changing process of suzhi and suzhi education. This chapter adopts the term “suzhi” rather than English translations such as “quality” because the latter fails to capture the many layers of meanings embedded in these terms that “traverse the complex terrain of economic, social, and political relationships” (Anagnost, 2004, p. 197). If an individual is described as having suzhi, it means they possess certain traits, capacities, and cultural cultivation often associated with modernity, urbanity, and civilities (Yan, 2008). Suzhi is also used to describe an individual’s level of educational achievement (Woronov, 2008). With its rich meanings, suzhi shapes people’s understanding of education and its purposes. For example, since the 1990s, the development of suzhi in citizens has been closely tied to the demands of the knowledge economy (Lou, 2011), and this prompted the discourse of “suzhi education,” sometimes translated as qualityoriented education as a contrast to yingshi (exam-based) education. Suzhi education is viewed as an essential element of the nation’s broader human capital development strategy “driven by new economic, socio-political and educational needs resulting from globalization” (Law, 2014, p. 20). Specifically, China reformed its K–12 curriculum in the early 2000s with the goal of producing a labor force with high suzhi to meet the demands of a knowledge economy and gain an edge in fierce global competition (Law, 2014; Lou, 2011). The new curriculum2 prompts a shift from a subject-centered, knowledge/factcentered, and teacher-centered curriculum to an interdisciplinary, comprehensive, and student-centered curriculum. The goal is to cultivate a generation with high suzhi, such as creativity and problem-solving skills (Zhong, 2009), and to embody and enact China’s modernity and growing power on the world stage (Kipnis, 2001, 2006; Woronov, 2009). The new curriculum has advantages over the old exam-oriented education, but it is frequently critiqued due to problems with its implementation. Some scholars (Lou, 2011; Sargent, 2011; Wang, 2011) have pointed out how rural schools, in particular, have difficulties in implementing suzhi education and the new curriculum because of the structural inequity between rural and urban regions. For instance, rural teachers often lack corresponding professional training and resources, and they frequently teach the “new” suzhioriented curriculum in the “old” exam-oriented way, stressing memorialization and rote learning.

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Other scholars have examined the ideological aspect of the new curriculum and argue that the discourses of suzhi and suzhi education reproduce structural inequity between urban and rural communities. Specifically, suzhi is often used to reference desirable traits and qualities of citizens in the processes of modernization, urbanization, marketization, and globalization (Anagnost, 2004; Bakken, 2000; Kipnis, 2006; Yan, 2008). By making its curriculum suzhi-oriented and defining the content and the goals of its education around the discourse of suzhi, the nation essentially includes in its education system “discourses on how to produce the ‘ideal’ citizen as well as what to do about the less-than-ideal citizen” (Jacka, 2009, p. 524). As this chapter reveals, rural or migrant citizens, after going through the urban-centered suzhi education, often are educated to look down upon their rural roots and view those as being backward, inferior, and not desirable. The suzhi discourse privileges urban citizens while creating more obstacles to rural citizens’ upward social mobility through education. Schooling hence becomes parts of the “processes and institutions that produce and reproduce boundaries and gradations between different types of citizenship and citizens” (Jacka, 2009, p. 524). Scholars (Anagnost, 2004; Kipnis, 2006; Tomba, 2009; Woronov, 2009; Yan, 2008) have elaborated on the term suzhi and how it is linked to social stratification in China, particularly between urban and rural communities and residents. Suzhi serves as a way to “reinforce, legitimate, and hide the systemic causes of levels of social inequality in China” (Jacka, 2009, p. 525). Yan’s (2008) studies of domestic workers in China examined how the discourse of suzhi justified the exploitation of female migrant workers, as rural citizens are constructed as lacking suzhi and its associated traits of “formal education, civility, discipline, initiative, cosmopolitanism” (p. 94). As Jacka (2009) concludes, suzhi is used as “a value coding” (p. 525) to differentiate between those regarded as “civilized” and “uncivilized,” specifically the divide between urban residents and rural migrants. Thus, suzhi discourse masks systematic, structural inequities between the rural and urban regions in China produced via policies such as hukou and other socio-economic factors. By marking rural and migrant citizens as less “civilized” and with low suzhi, it justifies the urban-rural school divide and the exploitation of rural and migrant citizens as cheap labor. They do not receive quality education and, as a result, it makes them less deserving of equal treatment with their urban counterparts. My work extends this line of inquiry by showing how rapid changes in the socio-economic landscape in China in the past a few decades have made the suzhi discourse even more present, fluid, and consequential. With rural, migrant parents and their children frequently changing their residences, it is increasingly difficult to fix their identities as either rural or urban. Therefore, the qualities of suzhi, long associated with urbanity, no longer serve to demarcate citizens as neatly as they may have done in the past. The CCS approach is especially appropriate in this study because it allows me to trace a culturally defined phenomenon, suzhi, across place and time

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(Bartlett & Vavrus, 2017b). Culture is never bounded and is mutable, especially in a large, diverse, and rapidly changing country like China. By tracing suzhi discourse across different time periods in my two longitudinal studies, I was able to show its meaning has shifted over time. Specifically, the sections below reveal how internal migration has disrupted the once-easy equation of “urban” and suzhi. In this process, the meaning of suzhi and suzhi education has changed from what was originally a Chinese concept indicating urbanity and modernity to one that is increasingly linked to global neoliberalism and to anyone—regardless of their roots—who participates in the urban, marketdriven capitalist economy.

The Two Longitudinal Studies The data in this chapter are drawn from two longitudinal studies I conducted between 2005 and 2019. The first, carried out from 2005 to 2012, involved rural middle school students in Shaanxi Province in Northwest China. Primarily, it included an ethnography of Longma Middle School3 in a poverty-stricken county, where I regularly observed 7th–9th grade classrooms; interviewed students, teachers, and administrators; and conducted a content analysis of the textbooks. Over 60% of students at the time of the study had one or both parents working in the cities. In 2012, I conducted a survey of 8th grade rural students from six selected schools in Shaanxi Province, Henan Province, and Zhejiang Province in Northwestern, Central, and Eastern China, respectively to examine how regional differences, specifically different economic levels and urbanization, have shaped rural students’ schooling experience and academic and career aspirations differently or similarly. I later conducted a second longitudinal project with one migrant children’s school (grades 1–9), Boren School, in Zhejiang Province in Eastern China from 2015 to 2019. Zhejiang is one of the most developed provinces in China and attracts migrant workers from around the country, including those from Shaanxi Province. I spent four to six weeks each May and June conducting ethnographic observations and interviews with students, teachers, and administrators. I also conducted a photovoice project with selected 8th grade students in the migrant children’s school and in a nearby rural school, Wangyang Middle School. Adapted from Wang et al.’s (1996) photovoice method, I asked students to use their smartphones or disposable cameras to take and share meaningful pictures about their lives at home, school, and in the wider community. Their pictures served as a springboard for conversations during interviews and allowed me, as the researcher, “the possibility of perceiving the world from the viewpoint of the people who lead lives that are different from those traditionally in control of the means for imaging the world” (Wang et al., 1996, p. 1393). Both studies generated rich ethnographic data. Students in the two projects, regardless of their location during the time of the research, made frequent references to other locales—urban, rural, and in-between—in their

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descriptions of their past, current, and future lives. During the first longitudinal study, the new curriculum was just being implemented. Naturally, various stakeholders shared their experiences with it and their understandings of suzhi education. During the second study, suzhi education was no longer as a buzzword, yet suzhi and suzhi education are still salient themes, which led to a rich comparison to the earlier study.

Study I: The New Curriculum, Suzhi Education, and Rural Children in China (2005–2012) Educators’ Response to the New Curriculum During 2005–2012 in Northwest China, rural teachers and administrators alike had many doubts about the new K–12 curriculum that was supposed to promote suzhi education. Even though they appreciated its innovation and potential to improve students’ overall suzhi, specifically creativity and problem-solving abilities, they lamented how difficult it is to implement it in rural schools, where teachers often lack in-service training and resources. Regardless of China’s push to switch from an exam-based education to a suzhi-oriented education, as teachers and administrators pointed out, the assessment system changed little, and Chinese education is still very much test-based. Rural teachers often taught the new curriculum the same way they did during the old curriculum—relying on rote learning and memorization, partially due to the lack of ability and partially due to their belief in memorization as key to their students’ success in the high school entrance exam. For example, all teachers I observed regularly skipped the recommended “extension assignments,” such as debate, public speech, or small research projects, after each unit in the Chinese textbooks. The teachers understood the benefits of such assignments in improving students’ overall suzhi, but they did not know how to teach these skills nor were they motivated as they viewed these as taking precious time away from students’ rote learning for exam preparation. With the new curriculum aimed at promoting suzhi education, the exams that determine advancement in the school system tend to privilege urban students who come with the desired suzhi due to their living contexts and upbringing. Unlike the previous curriculum that tested students on knowledge within the textbooks, the new curriculum assessed many things outside of textbooks. For example, in Chinese exams, much of the content is not introduced in the textbook. It requires students to do extensive readings on their own beyond the classroom. The teachers in my study agreed that this is a better way to determine students’ actual ability (nengli), but they critiqued this process as unfair to rural children as they had fewer opportunities to expand their learning at home due to lack of resources, especially when their parents were away as migrant workers and their caretakers’ education level was generally low.

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Furthermore, many teachers complained about the urban-centered nature of the new curriculum and the tests, and how detached they are from rural students’ life. Ms. Mei, a 9th grade English teacher, critiqued the English textbook that followed the daily life of two urban children and their friendship with a Canadian friend. Her students barely understood the context of the reading passages about these urban children, and they often posed questions about their lives that even the teacher, also from the rural region, could not answer. The national exams are also urban centered. For instance, after a mock high school entrance exam, a Chinese teacher lamented how his rural students did not even understand some of the questions on the test because the context was based on living in cities with references to the names of chain restaurants, traffic regulations, and other experiences his rural students had not had. In a few cases, the textbooks managed to connect to a rural context, such as when the 9th grade Chinese textbook included an essay about a leftbehind child and his grandfather. However, I observed that the teacher did not take the opportunity to connect the content to her students’ daily life; instead, she focused on the literal explanation of the texts and quizzed students on comprehension and analysis of selected sentences. It is common for teachers of almost all subjects to neglect or even skip teaching relevant content to their students. For example, teachers routinely skipped suggested assignments in the geography and biology textbooks that called on students to study local sites. Most local explorations are expected to happen in urban settings, such as in museums and factories, though occasionally it can be set in rural regions when exploring plants and nature. Teachers deemed these tasks either not applicable or not useful. They questioned whether suzhi education, including a focus on contextually relevant content as in these assignments, would work for rural students as the local context referenced in the textbooks and assessed in the entrance exams is often an urban one. Students’ Struggles with Suzhi and Suzhi Education It was not only teachers but students who were frustrated with the new curriculum. Students at Longma Middle School, like those in other rural schools, spent extremely long hours studying. Their school day started at 7:00 a.m. with morning reading classes and finished at 8:00–9:00 p.m. after mandatory evening study sessions. They knew the only way to compete with their privileged urban counterparts was through eating bitterness (chiku), or enduring hardship—dedicating extremely long hours to studying. However, students came to me with great doubts: “I have tried so hard. How come I still don’t improve [in the tests]?” They also questioned their teachers’ pedagogy. For example, one student said: “I sensed that my teacher’s way might not be right. She just asked me to memorize everything. But that does not seem to be working on tests. When I asked her if there are other better ways, she just shut me down.” Rural students, even though they did not

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have a clear sense of the why and how of suzhi education, had come to realize that the new curriculum was harder on them than the previous one, and that their teachers’ pedagogy was not helping them succeed with it. With the shift to suzhi education, the core subjects in the curriculum, while still important, no longer played a decisive role in determining success in testing. In the previous exam-oriented curriculum, rural students, even with fewer resources, could still be successful in the fierce competition by working very hard and putting in many more hours of memorization and rote learning than their urban counterparts as they were tested on the same textbook knowledge. With the new curriculum, however, rural students found themselves further behind, regardless of their hard work, as they were suddenly being tested on knowledge beyond the boundaries of textbooks and the horizon of their surrounding rural context. No amount of memorization could help them make up for the missing horizon due to their rural origin. Urban students, however, are immersed in a context that induces suzhi traits like creativity, innovation, horizon of knowledge, and pro-social skills. Therefore, by promoting a suzhi-oriented new curriculum, discipline and hard work give way to upbringing, and rural students have fallen further behind in this fierce competition of education testing based on new curriculum standards (Kipnis, 2001). The urban-centered curriculum and suzhi education discourse put rural students in a very disadvantaged position, and reinforce and reproduce the socio-economic gaps between the urban and rural society. The urban-centered curriculum and the formal schooling process also promoted a rural versus urban dualism in the construction of suzhi and suzhi education. In the survey I conducted with rural 8th grade students in Shaanxi, Henan, and Zhejiang provinces in 2012, I found that, when students were asked to write descriptors for a city and the countryside, almost all students across the three regions stated that the urban area was developed and modern, associated with high suzhi, while the rural areas were poor and backward, associated with low suzhi. After the survey, interviews with selected students reported that textbooks, among other sources such as the media, are responsible for such a dualistic way of thinking about urban and rural spaces. The results of the survey suggest that even though rural schools aim to educate citizens with high suzhi to contribute to China’s modernization process, the urban-centered curriculum promoting suzhi as closely linked to urbanity contributed to the sense of inferiority among rural students. It treated their rural roots and knowledge as backward, thereby masking and legitimating the existing structural inequity between rural and urban regions (Sun, 2009).

Study II: What Is Suzhi and Who Is Responsible for Its Cultivation? Suzhi Education Deconstructed and Redefined for Rural and Migrant Children (2015–2019) The 2015–2019 study of migrant children in Zheijiang Province pointed to some new implications of suzhi and suzhi education. In the following two

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sections, I discuss how the new study, compared to the earlier one, moves the discussion of suzhi and suzhi education beyond the urban-rural dualism and reveals the neoliberalism shift of Chinese education that is responsible for cultivating suzhi. Suzhi beyond Urban-Rural Dualism Boren School enrolled migrant children (1st–9th grade) and was a so-called people-run government-assisted (minban gongzhu) school. The school was located in an urban-rural juncture incorporated into the municipal government in 2019. The local government had relatively welcoming policies for migrant workers compared to megacities such as Shanghai and Beijing. Migrant children could attend public schools as long as they had proper documentation, including parents’ employment contracts, social security records, and a lease/house propriety certificate, among others. Those who tested high at graduation from elementary school were admitted to the local public middle school, Wangyang Middle School (7th–9th grades), with about 60% of its students with local rural township’s hukou and 40% being migrant children. Those migrant children who did not test as high attended Boren School; most then continued on to vocational high schools, viewed as an inferior choice compared to academic high schools, even though some local vocational high schools are among the best in China with great career placement thanks to the booming local economy. Teachers at both Boren and Wangyang schools tended to make a sweeping generalization about suzhi and how it serves as a divider to explain the academic discrepancy between rural and urban children and between migrant and local children. On a closer look, their narratives are based on false assumptions about rural, migrant parents and children as a homogeneous community, which does not reflect the reality. There are instead far more socio-economic differences within both the migrant workers’ and the local rural communities. For example, at the end of the school day, some parents came driving cars that included pricey Audis, while other parents could not afford a car but rode bikes; they all waited in the same line at the school gate to pick up their children. Migrant and local children came from families ranging from small business owners living in purchased condos in new high-rise buildings to workers in factories who rented one room for the whole family from the local villagers. Their parents also had different education backgrounds, ranging from elementary school to college, with the younger parents usually being the better educated ones. The photovoice project revealed that some migrant parents pay for their children to receive piano, calligraphy, and other enrichment classes over weekends, just as their local and urban counterparts do. When making references to suzhi, teachers at both Boren and Wangyang sometimes suggested that the local children had more suzhi than migrant children. Other times, they argued that migrant workers living in the city center with better

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careers had higher suzhi than the local families and made better educational decisions for their children. At Wangyang, where both migrant and local rural children study, teachers talked about how some migrant children’s families had higher suzhi than some local rural families. In fact, the teachers could hardly differentiate who were migrant children and who were local students without checking school records. It is clear from the analysis of both two longitudinal studies that suzhi and suzhi education are complex concepts, and that their meaning has changed as the rural-urban dichotomy in China has grown blurrier from 2015 to 2019. As some domestic scholars have pointed out (Li & Wang, 2014), urban-rural dualism no longer captures the rapid changes in socioeconomic structures in China. Chinese society today is further stratified into more small “worlds” beyond the rural and the urban (Li & Wang, 2014). Even within the rural and migrant social groups, they are stratified into an elite group—those with more skills, education, and hence more resources and mobility—and a bottom group with fewer of these resources and are often left behind in the villages. Suzhi Deconstructed as Various Abilities and the Question of Who Should Teach It The younger teachers, the majority at Boren, stated that they learned about suzhi education during their teacher education program and had opportunities to practice it when student teaching, often in urban schools. Ms. Lu, a Chinese and citizenship education teacher, said her urban students were able to accomplish suzhi education, but “it’s impossible to do so here. Students’ foundation is way too weak.” This was a common sentiment at Boren. Other teachers frequently spoke about the students’ weak academic foundation and attributed this to why they had a low expectation of students and deemed them with no potential to go to academic high schools. The 8th grade science teacher, Ms. Mao, when prompted, gave more insight about what specifically “weak foundation” means. She commented: my students have no tuozhan nengli [ability to extend and expand knowledge]… I think it’s because of the way they were brought up… For example, many urban families or even our local [rural] families, when their kids were younger and they took them out to play…their kid saw a flower and the parents would explain what they know about flowers to teach the kid. This is what I mean by extension and expansion ability. This helps students to connect the dots into lines and draw connections to what they learn. But these kids [migrant children] grew up very differently. Their parents do not have such knowledge or skills to do so. Nor do they have time. Ms. Mao attributed her students’ difficulty comprehending complex scientific concepts to the fact that their parents failed to cultivate specific abilities

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in them when they were younger. Tuozhan nengli, or the ability to extend and expand knowledge in thinking, as she explained, is essential to kexue suyang, scientific literacy, which is one of the goals of suzhi education, according to her training as a science teacher. She linked her students’ lack of such abilities to their parents’ migrant status, as she believed that migrant parents have no time, money, or capacity to support their children’s development of such abilities, compared to local rural and urban families. Ms. Li, a 9th grade Chinese teacher, offered a similar example when trying to explain her students’ struggle with learning Chinese. She argued that “they cannot transfer their learning when dealing with any new essays outside of textbook… Anything that requires analysis, or anyway for them to organize their own thoughts, is challenging for them.” Ms. Li pointed out the importance of families as educators because the curriculum requires children to read extensively outside of school. Many migrant parents had limited capacity to support their children at home due to their demanding work schedules and mostly relied on school for their children’s education. One 8th grade student commented on Ms. Li’s class: “What we talked about in the class mostly won’t be tested… Often Teacher Li asked ‘What does this sentence mean?’ And then she revealed the answers on the next PowerPoint slide. I feel the teacher is trying to teach some sort of nengli (ability), but I just don’t get it.” This student’s comment reflects the view of teachers like Ms. Li and Ms. Mao, who expect their students to come to school already equipped with specific kinds of abilities, skills, and knowledge, much of which demands input from parents from when the children were little. Teachers at Boren School agreed that if the students arrived without such abilities or support from their families, the teacher’s options were very limited. This is why some migrant parents, like their urban counterparts, paid for their children’s tutoring classes in subjects such as Chinese and English to bridge the gap between family and school education. However, that expensive strategy excluded many; those who struggled economically or had low expectation for their children’s education opted for tutoring in only one subject or for none at all. It is important to point out that Boren teachers compared and contrasted two different types of suzhi as manifested in a variety of abilities (nengli): One type related to academic studies as mentioned above whereby migrant children are viewed as lacking, and the other type of ability relating to abilities beyond academic studies. Ms. Hu, an 8th grade math and arts teacher, assessed her students as those with limited suzhi because students with greater suzhi have been cherry-picked by the local public school. Here, she referred to suzhi as academic abilities and found that her students “did poorly with anything that required them to think.” However, she described the same students as “being good with anything that uses their hands”— manual labor, drawing, crafting, etc. Similarly, Mr. Wang, an 8th grade English teacher, judged that his students’ IQ (intellectual quotient) might not

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be high, but their strength is in EQ (emotional quotient), and even greater than their local and urban counterparts because migrant children often do house chores regularly, have a sibling or more to care for, and take parttime jobs during summer breaks to supplement the household’s income. Ms. Lu pointed out why it is key to emphasize these non-academic forms of suzhi as “their [migrant students’] hands cannot master the pens [academic learning]. They need to develop other skills to better prepare for the work world.” In brief, not all teachers at Boren brought up the words suzhi or suzhi education in our interviews. Instead, they talked about a variety of nengli (abilities) as various dimensions of suzhi education. This is a striking contrast to the first longitudinal study. Teachers in the second study came with formal training in suzhi education pedagogies. Boren teachers did not use the term suzhi education as much as their counterparts in Longma did a decade ago. This is not because it is no longer a focus, but rather suzhi education has become more integrated into various aspects of their teaching. Boren teachers, compared to Longma teachers, were able to elaborate on the concrete meanings, practices, and goals of suzhi education in their respective subjects with far more sophistication. In most cases, they spoke about suzhi education as it pertains to students’ academic learning, but, occasionally, they also used suzhi to describe domains beyond the academic realm. The key difference between these two time periods, however, has to do with the responsibilization of students and their families for lacking in suzhi. Manifested in a variety of dimensions of abilities, suzhi, especially the kind that pertains to formal academic learning, is now viewed by teachers as missing from migrant students due to their migrant parents’ childrearing processes, which do not include a lot of home-based instruction. Teachers at Longma School in 2005–2012 pushed back against the urban-centric new curriculum and critiqued the urban-rural inequity imbedded in the education system that contributed to the failure of rural students. Teachers at Boren in 2015–2019 instead put the blame on families. These teachers were critical of parents’ perceived failure to cultivate suzhi in their children and lack of support for their children’s upward social mobility. Fifteen years apart, from the perspectives of educators, suzhi education moved from the public domain (schools) to the private domain (individual families). Suzhi and suzhi education became an important tool for neoliberal governmentality in differentiating and tracking individuals (Kipnis, 2007). While the government continues investing in public education and views it as one of its core missions, a significant share of the burden, including money, time, and emotional input to support the children’s overall suzhi development, has been shifted from the school to the family, from the public to the private domain. Students from families who fail to support their children adequately in the suzhi development process for academic advancement are left with fewer ideal options, such as vocational education and working-class jobs, relying on abilities aligned with their rural roots.

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Discussion and Conclusions This chapter drew upon two longitudinal, multi-sited studies to show how suzhi and suzhi education discourses have evolved over time and place. The CCS approach enabled me to trace the central phenomenon of suzhi both historically and spatially. I did this by looking at how multiple actors, including students, teachers and administrators, interpreted, referenced, and responded to suzhi and suzhi education similarly or differently during the period from 2005 to 2019. Together, the two studies allow me to explore the rapid urbanization and migration in China. This comparative case study reveals two key findings from its examination of the nature of suzhi and suzhi education in today’s China. First, it challenges the rigid urban-rural dichotomy many studies assume when discussing the suzhi discourse in specific and education in China in general. The suzhi discourse that helped to maintain a strict urban-rural divide in the 2005– 2012 study has been complicated in the 2015–2019 study because social stratification has furthered in China so that it occurs within social groups such as migrant and rural communities. It is clear in the latter study that suzhi is associated today with rurality by teachers and is closely tied to nonacademic domains and working-class jobs that migrant children, as well as some rural children, will have in the future. Boren teachers emphasized their migrant students’ assets, or good suzhi, such as being handy, having the ability to endure hardship, and possessing emotional intelligence. They deemed these traits useful for migrant children as they become skilled workers after vocational high school. Meanwhile, suzhi is also associated with urbanity or urban upbringing by teachers who see expansion and comprehensive capabilities (nengli) as important for students if they hope to succeed in academic learning in order to enter university and secure middle-class jobs in cities. This, however, is constructed as missing from both migrant children and rural children with little family support to cultivate such suzhi from childhood onward. Such suzhi is associated with traits that have more to do with their families’ economic, social, and cultural capital due to migrant parents’ education level, years in the city, careers, etc., rather than merely their rural or urban hukou. Rural and migrant children are alike in this regard. Many will not reproduce their parents’ social class and will, instead, end up in a new social class, such as semi-skilled workers in the service economy (Woronov, 2011). The suzhi discourse, implemented in the form of suzhi education at school, reinforces the advantageous position that urban residents enjoy over the rural and migrant ones, and the middle- and upper-class groups enjoy over the working- and lower-class groups, regardless as to whether they are rural, migrant, or even urban. The rural-urban dichotomy, as well as the suzhi narrative that helps to demarcate this dividing line, is hence problematized by rapid urbanization, migration, and increasing social stratification within Chinese society. A combination of factors, including families’ economic, social, and

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cultural capital, in addition to the rural-urban divide, shape the suzhi and suzhi education discourses and channel rural, migrant, and urban students to different levels of education and of careers. The second key finding that this comparative case study afforded has to do with the neoliberal shift of Chinese education when families are increasingly being held responsible to cultivate suzhi in children. Migrant, rural, and even urban families without resources are placed in a particularly disadvantageous position if they seek to move up the social ladder because they are blamed for their shortcomings. Their children, who are already vulnerable, are further disadvantaged due to such a discursive shift. The suzhi and suzhi education discourses are now being utilized to attribute failure among these disadvantaged students to their families rather than critiquing inequity in the system itself. This is a paradigm shift in Chinese education, and it raises critical questions for educators as well as education scholars: In today’s China, what is education for, and who is it for? Who is able to move up the socioeconomic ladder, and who is left behind? This new paradigm leads research on Chinese education in a very different direction.

Reflections on the CCS Approach I conclude by discussing some challenges and implications of my use of the CCS approach. This chapter is an accidental comparative case study, as my two longitudinal studies were meant to be two different projects. It was not in my original intention or design to compare them with each other. At most, I viewed the second study as continuing my passion to study rural children as they become migrant children, while extending key questions such as the impact of urbanization on education from my first study to more stakeholders and in different times and places. However, during both studies, the suzhi and suzhi education discourses emerged as key phenomena connecting both studies, and this prompted me to adopt the CCS approach to examine the changes of such phenomena over time and space, and analyze their implications accordingly. As the two studies are not aligned perfectly in their respective methodologies and original research questions, I struggled at times with the imbalance of data collected with different methods during different times. For example, semesterlong ethnography during the first study allowed me to exam teachers’ pedagogies closely through observations and content analysis, while during the second study I relied heavily on interviews about teaching with teachers, administrators, and students. Fortunately, both studies are longitudinal and include thick descriptions and rich data collected from a variety of stakeholders through different methods. This allowed a thorough examination of the issue and the creation of a complex picture of how changes regarding the suzhi and suzhi discourses evolve over time and place. Such broad data sets may afford the potential to turn other multi-sited longitudinal studies into comparative case studies once key processes connecting these studies are identified; such comparative studies can be conducted retrospectively yet still meaningfully.

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The adoption of the CCS approach was crucial for the realization of the findings as summarized in this chapter. They would not have been obvious if I had only examined one of the two longitudinal studies. By tracing the phenomenon of suzhi and suzhi education along the historical, transversal axis of the CCS approach, I was able to illustrate how a uniquely Chinese concept is being redefined owing to the country’s increasing connections to the global economy and to global discourses about education and the ideal educated person. The horizontal axis of this CCS study added to the analysis because it drew attention to enduring dichotomies, such as between urban and rural sites and citizens. The vertical axis highlighted how regional and national patterns of social stratification, long based on the rural/urban dichotomy, are being reshaped to some degree due to China’s integration into the global political economy. This comparative case study enriches both theories on suzhi and approaches to comparative education research. It has implications for scholars and policymakers seeking to reexamine education for rural and migrant children in China and elsewhere in the world.

Discussion Questions 1

2

3

Lou draws on two longitudinal studies conducted between 2005 and 2019 in making the argument that the meaning of suzhi and, by extension, suzhi education, has changed significantly during this period in conjunction with China’s economic transformation. What were some of the most compelling examples of this discursive shift for you, particularly as it relates to distinctions between rural-urban and migrant-nonmigrant students and their families? How do the methods Lou employed in each longitudinal study allow her to examine these evolving discourses? If you could speak with her, what questions would you ask about how she drew from these two studies carried out at different times and with distinct populations? How might you incorporate a longitudinal component in your prospective study? If you were to do so, how would you modify your existing research questions and your methods?

Notes 1 National Bureau of Statistics. (2021). A summary of statistics of the 7th national census. http://www.stats.gov.cn/tjsj/zxfb/202105/t20210510_1817176.html 2 It is the 8th curriculum in China since 1949. 3 All school and county names in this chapter are pseudonyms.

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Section V

New Directions

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Ensuring Quality in Pre-Primary Education A Comparative Case Study of Tanzanian Stakeholder Perspectives Bethany Wilinski

Introduction Global efforts to measure and improve early childhood education (ECE) quality rarely acknowledge that notions of quality are culturally informed and vary across place and time (Tobin et al., 2009; Yamamoto & Li, 2012). Instead, global measurement tools, such as the Measuring Early Learning Quality and Outcomes (MELQO) tool, often advance an assumption that a universal vision of quality can be applied, with minimal adaptation, to evaluate the quality of children’s learning in ECE classrooms around the world. I employed the comparative case study (CCS) approach in this analysis of Tanzanian stakeholders’ perspectives on pre-primary quality to interrogate the presumed universality of a tool like MELQO. In this CCS, I compare how global notions of ECE quality circulate across international, national, and local scales (vertical axis) and how policy actors in three socially and materially diverse regions in Tanzania take up, modify, or contest internationally valued notions of ECE (horizontal axis). In this chapter, I discuss the study design, including my use of video-cued ethnography (VCE) (Adair & Kurban, 2019; Tobin, 2019) to generate indepth data about stakeholders’ perspectives on quality. VCE employs video in focus group discussions as a stimulus to elicit participants’ tacit beliefs and understandings. Diverse stakeholders’ reactions to video clips of Tanzanian pre-primary classrooms provided insights into whether and how their views on pre-primary quality aligned with each other and global notions of quality reflected in MELQO. I present findings from VCE interviews with national policymakers and university researchers and discuss the implications of these findings for policy and practice. My analysis highlights the power of the CCS approach for tracing the flow of global policy ideas and the affordances of pairing VCE with CCS to develop a nuanced understanding of stakeholders’ perspectives on an abstract idea like “quality.”

Background and Conceptual Framework Evidence that participation in high-quality ECE contributes to improved academic outcomes (e.g. Duncan et al., 2007; Gormley & Phillips, 2005) has DOI: 10.4324/9781003216551-10

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resulted in a significant global focus on improving ECE quality. This is underscored by Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) 4.2, which calls for ensuring all children have access to quality pre-primary education. The MELQO tool was developed by UNESCO, UNICEF, the World Bank, and the Brookings Institution to measure countries’ progress toward SDG 4.2. MELQO aims to generate data on ECE program quality to inform policy and improve learning outcomes. A key motivation for MELQO is to “build regional and global comparability” (Anderson & Sayre, 2016, p. 1) in the assessment of ECE quality. However, research, including recent research on the MELQO tool, has demonstrated that ideas about what constitutes quality in ECE are not universal (e.g. Raikes et al., 2020; Tobin, 2005; Tobin et al., 2009; Yamamoto & Li, 2012). MELQO is premised on the notion that ideas about ECE quality are “transferable certainties” (Schweisfurth & Elliott, 2019, p. 6)—applicable regardless of context and local conditions. Beyond ECE, ideas about quality and best practice circulate as a result of “cultural, economic, and political forces that privilege certain approaches to pedagogy worldwide” (Vavrus, 2009, p. 309). Even so, there is considerable evidence that teachers rarely adopt globally circulating pedagogical ideals wholesale (e.g. Altinyelken, 2010; Moland, 2017). Instead, they develop “contingent pedagogies” (Vavrus, 2009, p. 310), interpreting policy ideas through the lens of their own beliefs, experiences, and contextual realities. Schweisfurth and Elliott (2019) conceptualize the connections among these elements as a “pedagogical nexus” within which new practices are necessarily “recontextualized and/or reframed” (p. 1). Following this perspective, a central assumption of my study is that ideas about quality are always contingent because they are developed within a pedagogical nexus that is reflective of teachers’ local context(s). This study is grounded in a sociocultural approach to policy analysis. I conceptualize MELQO as a de facto policy because it was developed and is promoted by funders whose reform ideas constitute a powerful force in shaping educational policy and practice in aid-dependent settings like Tanzania (Bartlett et al., 2015; Klees et al., 2012). A sociocultural understanding of policy as practice views policy as a site of cultural production among actors and institutions spanning levels of social organization (Sutton & Levinson, 2001). As MELQO circulates globally, it has the potential to produce new norms for teachers, children, and families in Tanzania and elsewhere, regardless of whether the vision of quality it promotes is relevant or feasible in those settings. The aim of this study is to understand how ideas about quality in MELQO intersect with on-the-ground realities in Tanzania and diverse stakeholders’ perspectives on quality. This study thus explores how the assumptions and ideologies woven into the fabric of a policy like MELQO structure the lived experiences of those who encounter and are subject to them (Shore & Wright, 1997). This study is also informed by conceptualizations of culture and context that are central to the CCS approach. Although my study is set in Tanzania,

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I eschew the use of “nation-state adjectives for cultural practices” by drawing on a conceptualization of culture as dynamic and “not spatially delimited” (Bartlett & Vavrus, 2017, p. 17). A central assumption of this study, therefore, is that within Tanzania, multiple and divergent perspectives on what constitutes good quality pre-primary education exist, and that these perspectives are shaped by stakeholders’ cultural and material realities, which themselves are multiple and shifting. I do not seek to identify an inherently “Tanzanian” notion of quality. Instead, my goal is to understand how ideas about quality are formed within “communities of practice that are multiple and shift over time” and that exist “in relation to systems of power and inequality” (Bartlett & Vavrus, 2017, p. 10). Following Bartlett and Vavrus’ (2017) call for “unbounding” in CCS research, I take a processual approach to understanding context as relational and spatial, rather than a fixed and static entity. Although I examine individual teachers and classrooms that exist in different geographic locales within Tanzania, I view these sites and actors as part of a broader “[network] of social relations and understandings” (Massey, 1991, p. 28, as cited in Bartlett & Vavrus, 2017, p. 13) that transcends spatial boundaries and physical borders. Ideas about ECE quality circulate through this web and are articulated as differently situated actors make sense of and enact policy. By engaging the vertical and horizontal axes of CCS, I examine meaning-making and policy enactment across geographies and levels of scale, with a focus on identifying within-country differences and understanding the limitations of relying on universalizing measures to improve ECE quality in diverse settings.

Methodological Overview Document Analysis I began this research by engaging in the analysis of MELQO documents and the tool itself to understand how MELQO conceptualizes pre-primary quality (Bowen, 2009). MELQO measures quality through classroom observation focused primarily on the types of learning opportunities teachers provide and uses the terms “play-based learning” and “teaching that enhances learning” to signify quality. In MELQO, play is defined as, “The provision of opportunities for all children to explore and engage in free play and group play, as well as their access to adequate play/learning materials and spaces to play” (UNESCO, 2017, p. 86). Play-based learning is thus conceptualized as learning opportunities that “are fun for the children,” “extend beyond lecture-style teaching and repetitive activities,” and “draw on [children’s] natural interests to question, explore, and experiment” (MELQO Global Team, 2018, p. 7). Teaching that enhances learning is defined as “occurring when teachers use questions and discussion to encourage children to expand on ideas or situations to help understand a concept” (MELQO Global Team, 2018, p. 7). In contrast to “play-based learning” and “teaching that enhances

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learning,” instruction that is lecture-based or involves only repetition is considered low-quality. The rubric used to evaluate math and literacy instruction provides further insight into MELQO’s conceptualization of quality. Learning activities are rated on a scale of one to four, with four indicating the highest level of quality. These activities are evaluated based on whether they are: play-based, include some element of child choice, foster children’s engagement in discussion, and/or connect to children’s real-life experience. If a lesson includes one of those elements, it is scored as a three, and it if includes two or more, it is scored as a four. When teachers only use repetitive activities in a lesson, it is scored as a two. A score of one indicates the absence of instruction in a particular content area (e.g., no literacy instruction occurred during the observation). Through its focus on play-based learning and particular forms of teacherchild interaction as indicators of ECE quality, MELQO reflects the current global emphases on play as a pedagogical ideal in ECE (Zosh et al., 2017) and teacher-child dialogue as essential to supporting young children’s learning (Leyva et al., 2015; Mashburn et al., 2008). In doing so, it ignores evidence that definitions of play, perspectives on the relationship between play and learning, and teachers’ enactment of play-based and other learner-centered approaches are culturally and contextually informed (Altinyelken, 2010; Kejo, 2017; Moland, 2017; Pramling-Samuelsson & Fleer, 2009; Vavrus, 2009; Yahya, 2016). Based on this analysis of the MELQO tool, I sought to understand the relevance of MELQO in Tanzania, where repetition and lecture-based instruction is the norm, even at the pre-primary level, and where contextual realities such as overcrowded classrooms and resource constraints are likely to limit teachers’ ability to enact MELQO’s version of quality. Video-cued Ethnography Video-cued ethnography (VCE) is a methodology that uses film as a stimulus to spark discussions among participants, typically in a focus group setting (Tobin et al., 1989, 2009; Tobin, 2019). Researchers first create a film or a set of films that will prompt discussion of the concept or issue under investigation. As participants engage in dialogue about their reactions to the film(s), their implicit thinking about the issue in question is revealed. For example, by showing teachers, administrators, and parents in China, Japan, and the United States a short video of a “typical” day in a preschool classroom in each country, Tobin et al. (1989, 2009) revealed the differences and similarities in the cultural logics of preschool teaching in each context. In VCE, the film itself is not data. Instead, it is a stimulus that allows researchers to create “a virtual conversation among a diverse community of stakeholders” (Tobin et al., 2013, p. 24), to generate rich data about an abstract concept, and to understand subtle differences within and across

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stakeholder groups (Adair & Kurban, 2019). In this study, video clips of instructional moments in pre-primary classrooms served as a stimulus that revealed participants’ ideas about what constitutes “good quality” pre-primary education in Tanzania and provided insights into their perspectives on how pre-primary quality could be enhanced in this setting. Creating Films To create films for VCE interviews, I identified two pre-primary classrooms in Moshi, Tanzania for filming in consultation with local ECE experts. The classrooms were both government-run and staffed by two teachers. Instruction was in Swahili, which I speak fluently, and class sizes were relatively small by Tanzanian standards (about 40 students). One classroom was located in an urban area and the other in a rural area; they enjoyed significantly different teaching and learning resources. The teachers in the urban school had formal teaching qualifications, while the teachers in the rural school had received informal training by NGOs. I expected that these contrasts (geographic and qualifications) would translate into differences in teacher practice and thus lead to rich discussions about quality. Prior to filming, my research assistant and I conducted four days of observation in each classroom and in-depth interviews with each pre-primary teacher (four total) to familiarize ourselves with classroom routines and build rapport with the teachers. Two local professional videographers filmed four three-hour sessions in each classroom (56 hours of footage total), and I took fieldnotes during filming. Afterward, I spent about 30 minutes showing teachers the rough video footage to gather their immediate reactions to what was captured on film. I generated data for this study from June to August 2020. The need to generate data remotely because of the COVID-19 pandemic led me to rethink my approach to editing video footage. Instead of creating 15–20-minute films that showed the arc of an entire school day (like Tobin and colleagues did), I edited video footage into five, two-minute-long clips of math and literacy lessons. I opted to create short clips to ensure they could be viewed reliably in Tanzania, where internet access is often a challenge. My focus on math and literacy aligns with Tanzania’s national emphasis on “the Three Rs” (reading, writing, and math), and ensures the study’s findings will be relevant to Tanzanian policymakers, teacher educators, and practitioners. By focusing on these two content areas, math and literacy also became key contexts in the study, as envisioned by Bartlett and Vavrus (2017). They call for a “radical rethinking of context,” which is usually conceptualized as a physical space (p. 11). Instead, they contend that settings can be conceptualized as “constituted by social activities and social interactions” or a series of “articulated moments” (p. 12). By inviting participants into these contexts—instructional moments in mathematics and literacy—I was able to create a virtual conversation about pre-primary quality that involved stakeholders in diverse geographies and social locations.

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A limitation to using short video clips (as opposed to longer films) is that participants were sometimes left speculating about the broader context of the instructional moment (e.g., whether this was a review lesson or the first time the teacher had taught this particular lesson). Because an entire lesson was compressed into a few minutes, it was also difficult for participants to tell whether the pace of the lesson was too fast or just right. In addition, the explicit focus on literacy and mathematics in the clips and in interview questions may have led participants to not share their views on other elements of quality unrelated to those content areas. Here, a brief overview of the clips and how they would be evaluated by MELQO is warranted. Clip 1, which shows a teacher reading a story aloud to her class, would be evaluated as a three because the teacher asks closedended questions about what happened in the story (as opposed to asking no questions at all). Clip 2 also shows a read-aloud but would be rated a four on MELQO because the teacher asks open-ended questions and connects the story to children’s own experience. In Clip 3, a phonics lesson, the teacher reads syllables from a poster and children repeat after her. Later, the children copy syllables written on the blackboard into their exercise book. This lesson would receive a two on MELQO because it involves only repetition and closed-ended activities. Clip 4, a math lesson about the number four, would also be scored as a two on the MELQO scale. Although the teacher used concrete objects to demonstrate quantity and encouraged children’s participation in the lesson through a jumping activity, children had no opportunity to manipulate objects themselves or to choose their activity. Clip 5, which shows children playing in learning areas, would be scored as a four because children were engaged in play and could choose their own activity and materials to manipulate. These video clips were posted on a password-protected webpage that participants accessed prior to their VCE interview. I provided participants with a small stipend to purchase a mobile phone data bundle or time at an internet café to view the clips. Although a few participants had to try repeatedly to get a good enough connection to watch the clips, the majority had no trouble accessing them. Data Generation The five video clips served as stimuli for VCE interviews with diverse policy actors (see Figure 9.1). Although VCE research typically employs focus group discussions, I did not think I could successfully conduct focus groups remotely, given internet connectivity issues in Tanzania. Instead, I decided to conduct individual VCE interviews via WhatsApp, a tool that is widely used in the country. Although the individual interview format does not allow for the type of crosstalk and shared meaning-making that is a hallmark of VCE (Tobin, 2019; Tobin et al., 2009), the data generated from phone interviews was rich and nuanced.

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Figure 9.1 Data Generation Overview

Along the vertical axis, I interviewed stakeholders at different levels of scale (policymakers, teacher educators, and pre-primary teachers) who have a direct influence on pre-primary policy and practice (see Table 9.1). These included policymakers at the Tanzania Institute of Education (TIE), the national government body responsible for curriculum and teacher development; university faculty with ECE expertise; and teacher educators who train pre-primary teachers at government teacher training colleges (TTCs). Interviews were conducted in English (policymakers, university faculty) or Swahili (teacher educators). Interviews lasted 60–90 minutes, were recorded, and (when conducted in Swahili) were transcribed by a native Swahili speaker. In this analysis, I focus on data from VCE interviews with policymakers and university researchers. Participants viewed video clips prior to their interview and were advised to watch each clip several times and write down their reactions. Each interview began with questions about the participant’s background, role, and involvement in national ECE activities. Then, I invited participants to reflect on each clip, one at a time, following the same set of prompts. Participants shared their general reaction to the clip, as well as their perspectives on what Table 9.1. Policymakers and University Researchers* Name

Role

Institution

Salma Hami Grace Thomas Dr. Batromeo James Dr. Neema Ally Dr. Eliapenda Minja Dr. Khamisi Kagashe Dr. Rashida Ulonzi Dr. Amani Chuwa

ECE Specialist ECE Specialist Lecturer Lecturer Lecturer Lecturer Lecturer Lecturer

Tanzania Institute of Education Tanzania Institute of Education Elimu University Hekima University Hekima University Kufundishia University Kufundishia University Wasomi University

*Names of people and institutions are pseudonyms, except for Tanzania Institute of Education.

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was good about the lesson, what could be improved, and how the lesson compared with those they had seen in other pre-primary classrooms in Tanzania. Most spoke about the clips in great detail, indicating familiarity. Although I avoided the using the word “quality” in questions because I did not want to steer the conversation too explicitly, participants nonetheless shared their perspectives on pre-primary quality. Along the CCS horizontal axis, my research assistant and I conducted VCE interviews with 25 pre-primary teachers who worked in a mix of urban and rural schools across three regions in Tanzania. We recruited a diverse sample because I wanted to understand whether and how social and material differences within and across regions to inform teachers’ views of quality (Yamamoto & Li, 2012). For instance, class size and access to teaching and learning materials may shape teachers’ perspectives and ability to enact their vision of quality. VCE phone interviews with pre-primary teachers followed the same format as above, with additional prompts about teachers’ own practice. Like policymakers and teacher educators, pre-primary teachers typically had much to say about the video clips. Data Analysis To analyze data policymaker and university faculty perspectives on pre-primary quality in relation to MELQO’s definition of quality, I first read interview transcripts and wrote analytic memos about my reflections on the data (Emerson et al., 2011). I noticed that, like the MELQO tool, policymakers were focused on teachers’ failure to use what they considered highquality pedagogical approaches (e.g., active learning), whereas university faculty centered their critique on elements of teacher knowledge (as opposed to pedagogical skill). To compare conceptualizations of quality across individuals and stakeholder groups, I created a data matrix (Miles et al., 2014) in which I organized data excerpts and summaries of participants’ reactions to each clip into the categories: “did well,” “improve,” and “compare [with other pre-primary classes].” As I did this, I developed a set of codes that reflected the range of perspectives on barriers to quality: “misconceptionslearning,” “content knowledge,” “teacher role in play,” “pedagogical skills,” and “resources.” I applied these codes to the data excerpts/summaries in the matrix and wrote analytic memos that served as the basis of the findings section below (Emerson et al., 2011).

Findings Although participants noted that the video clips portrayed examples of higher quality instruction relative to what they had observed in other Tanzanian pre-primary classrooms, they identified areas for improvement in each clip. It was notable that play-based learning did not emerge as a critical element of quality in any of the interviews, given its prominence in the

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MELQO tool and in global quality improvement efforts. In general, there was alignment in what policymakers and university faculty identified as shortcomings of the lessons they observed (e.g., teachers’ use of repetition, low-level questions, and choral responses), yet the two groups differed in their interpretations of why teachers employed these practices, which they perceived as low quality. Although the differences are subtle, they have important implications for policy and practice. Policymaker Perspectives on Quality Policymakers attributed poor pedagogy, in part, to teachers’ lack of training in methods and strategies that encourage active learning and to challenges like large classes and limited resources. For example, Grace Thomas explained that the notion of children learning through exploration and play was widespread in Tanzania. However, the problem was that teachers lacked the resources to enact such approaches. Salma Hami similarly noted: “The big problem [in preprimary] is the teaching and learning methods and strategies.” These ECE specialists were critical of instances in Clips 1, 2, and 3 where “teachers dominated the class” and did not provide children with opportunities to explore or do things on their own. In contrast, they responded favorably to the teacher’s use of sticks to demonstrate counting from one to four (Clip 4) and that she had the children jump as they counted by rote from one to 10. Although policymakers viewed these as positive examples of active learning, they were also critical of the lesson design, which did not allow the teacher to assess individual children’s understanding of concepts. These policymakers also attributed poor pedagogy to the fact that Tanzania had recently revamped its pre-primary curriculum (in 2016), and many pedagogical ideas were still new. For example, they asserted that the idea of storybook reading (Clips 1 & 2) and learning corners (Clip 5) were new ideas in Tanzania, and many pre-primary teachers had not yet learned how to use these approaches properly. In relation to learning corners, they appeared most concerned with the physical arrangement of these spaces, and less so with what teachers and children were doing. University Faculty Perspectives on Quality University faculty attributed teachers’ use of low-quality instructional practices to misconceptions about how children learn and to their limited knowledge of key concepts in early literacy and mathematics. Although they acknowledged that large classes and limited resources were a challenge for most pre-primary teachers, university faculty consistently downplayed the importance of these structural elements, instead focusing on teacher knowledge as critical to ensuring pre-primary quality. Dr. Kagashe’s reaction to Clip 3 (phonics lesson) exemplifies the perspective shared by other faculty that the widespread use of repetition and

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memorization in pre-primary was rooted in teachers’ misconceptions about learning. He explained: “My reaction is that…this is a typical teacher. This is a teacher who resembles many teachers in Tanzania. Most teachers…think children learn by copying, by memorizing what they have said.” Dr. Ulonzi shared this interpretation, noting that from her perspective, teachers used these strategies not because of large classes, but “because that is how [they] think children should learn.” This statement was notable and surprising because problems of pedagogy in settings like Tanzania are frequently attributed to resource constraints. Clips 1 and 2, which showed two different examples of a read aloud, also elicited discussions about theories of learning. Although they were impressed by what they considered an atypical instructional moment in the Tanzanian context, university faculty critiqued these lessons because students had limited opportunities to engage with books, think critically, or express themselves. These were elements of instruction participants viewed as essential to learning. University faculty also interpreted low-quality instruction as a reflection of teachers’ limited understanding of the concepts they teach. These perspectives emerged most clearly in response to the phonics (Clip 3) and math (Clip 4) lessons. Dr. Ally attributed the teacher’s use of repetition and choral responses in Clip 3 as an indication of her “lack of knowledge about early literacy.” She cited the need for teachers to understand and be able to teach children the foundations of reading, which she described as letter-sound relationships and the ability to break a word into syllables. Participants also expressed concern that the teacher in Clip 4 was “cramming” too many concepts (rote counting, recognizing and writing the numeral four, understanding quantity) into one lesson. To university faculty, this signaled the teacher’s limited understanding of mathematics, a problem they believed to be widespread among pre-primary teachers. Dr. Chuwa reflected on mathematics instruction in pre-primary with this perspective: Yes, resources are a problem, but also the knowledge of teachers in terms of math concepts. I think that knowledge is lacking in the majority of teachers… [For example], teachers lack knowledge on the importance of connecting the number with quantity. Indeed, nearly all university faculty were critical of the teacher’s attempt to teach about quantity in Clip 4. While they appreciated the teacher’s use of concrete and locally available objects (small sticks) to demonstrate the connection between the numeral four and a set of four objects, they felt the lesson required more time and opportunities for children to manipulate objects, as opposed to just watching the teacher. These ideas about teacher knowledge as an important element of pre-primary quality were not reflected in data from policymakers or in the MELQO tool. Below, I discuss the significance of stakeholders’ varied

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conceptualizations of quality and the implications of these findings for policy and practice.

Discussion The goal of this comparative case study was to examine how global ideas about ECE quality (exemplified by the MELQO tool) travel across levels of scale and intersect with on-the-ground realities in Tanzania. I employed video-cued ethnography to create virtual conversations with policy actors in different social and geographic locations to understand whether and how their perspectives on pre-primary quality align with each other and with MELQO’s definition of quality. In this chapter, I presented findings from my analysis of VCE interviews with national-level policymakers and university faculty; subsequent analyses will include the perspectives and experiences of TTC lecturers and pre-primary teachers. I found that, like the MELQO tool, policymakers and university faculty considered practices like repetition, closed-ended questions, and choral responses low quality. However, the two groups differed in what they identified as the causes of poor pedagogy. Policymakers attributed poor pedagogy to teachers’ lack of skill in facilitating active learning and to resource constraints, while university faculty viewed teacher knowledge as the root cause. In this section, I discuss the implications of these findings for policy and practice, discuss next steps for this project, and reflect on methodological insights generated from this work. Divergent Perspectives on Quality: Implications for Policy and Practice My analysis revealed that although policymakers and university faculty held similar views on what constituted high- or low-quality instruction in preprimary, they had different ideas about why teachers used low-quality methods. It is important to understand the subtle differences in their perspectives because these stakeholders play a key role in shaping national ECE policy and practice in Tanzania; their beliefs about the antecedents of low-quality instruction will shape national efforts to improve pre-primary quality. All participants cited teacher training as a means to address persistent low quality in pre-primary, a solution that prior research on pre-primary quality in Tanzania has also suggested (Davis et al., 2021). My analysis suggests, however, that while both stakeholder groups believe training is needed, they may have dramatically different ideas about what that training should entail. If the problem lies in pedagogy and resources alone, equipping teachers with the skills and supplies they need to enact active learning strategies may be the solution. However, if teacher knowledge is the core issue, interventions focused on pedagogy alone are unlikely to improve the quality of teaching and learning. Pedagogical improvement in the absence of conceptual understanding could create an illusion of quality without actually improving

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children’s learning experiences. Developing a shared understanding of quality and the elements of teaching that contribute to quality is thus critical to ensuring the success of quality improvement efforts. Comparing these stakeholders’ conceptualizations of quality with the MELQO tool also highlights a potential shortcoming of the tool in informing ECE quality efforts. Given MELQO’s focus on identifying instances of play-based learning and teacher-student interaction that enhance learning, it is unlikely that implementing MELQO in the pre-primary classrooms in the video clips would have surfaced the challenges identified by university faculty. Participants viewed the focal classrooms as high quality relative to most pre-primary classrooms in the country, and yet they identified significant deficiencies, even in the clips that would have been rated highly by MELQO. While the tool may be well-suited to identifying the presence of certain instructional strategies, it does not address the underlying knowledge teachers need to effectively enact those strategies. As a result, teachers may be able to score highly on MELQO using superficial pedagogical approaches that are not fully effective in supporting children’s learning.

Next Steps My analysis in this chapter engaged a small subset of the data I generated in this project. Even so, I was able to identify subtle differences in conceptualizations of pre-primary quality at the national level in Tanzania. I contend that these differences have significant implications for efforts to improve ECE quality. In the next phase of this study, analysis of data from TTC lecturers will reveal additional alignment or congruence along the vertical axis of this study. TTC lecturers’ perspectives on quality are of particular importance because they are responsible for providing pre- and inservice training to pre-primary teachers. Analysis of interviews with pre-primary teachers will offer insights into the ways material and cultural differences shape teachers’ practice and beliefs about quality. In the future, I plan to add additional levels of vertical comparison to my analysis by conducting VCE interviews with ECE experts in international development organizations and with pre-service teachers in Tanzania. VCE is thus a useful methodological tool for researchers who wish to conduct a CCS in phases because it allows the researcher to add sites and participants to the study incrementally. Although I view this as an affordance of VCE (and of pairing CCS and VCE), it could potentially lead to a researcher generating more data than they are able to analyze or generating a data set that is so complex it becomes overwhelming to analyze.

Methodological Reflections I designed this study with a strong understanding of CCS and considerable experience conducting ethnographic research in preschool settings in the

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United States and Tanzania (Graue et al., 2018; Wilinski, 2017, 2018; Wilinski & Morley, 2019). Although VCE was new to me, I decided to employ it in this study to address what I see as the limitations of traditional qualitative interviews in trying to understand an abstract concept like quality. In my prior research in Tanzania, I asked questions about pre-primary quality in interviews with student teachers and teacher educators. This yielded a set of superficial and very similar responses peppered with catch phrases like “active learning” and “child-centered.” Such responses mirror national and globally circulating discourse about ECE quality and could lead one to conclude that ideas about ECE quality are, in fact, universal. Having spent over a decade teaching and working with teachers in Tanzania, I was not convinced, which is why I chose to employ VCE in this study. The limits of traditional interviews in generating detailed data about quality can be seen in a recent study of stakeholders’ ideas about ECE quality in Tanzania and Lesotho (Davis et al., 2021). From interviews with policymakers in Tanzania and policymakers, ECE directors, and teachers in Lesotho, the authors identified “teachers as knowledgeable and caring facilitators,” “families and communities as partners,” and “the classroom as a stimulating learning environment” as key elements of ECE quality in those settings (p. 7). They conclude that existing government support for ECE is inadequate for ensuring quality in each country’s context. Although the study’s effort to draw comparisons across two national settings and diverse stakeholders within each context is noteworthy, the data and the authors’ discussion rarely pushes beyond what has been frequently cited in the extant literature as barriers to quality in low-resource settings (inadequate teacher preparation, lack of participation/partnership with families, and large classes/ limited teaching and learning materials). In contrast, by using VCE to examine stakeholder perspectives on quality, I was able to generate detailed insights about quality that went beyond institutional discourses and that highlighted within-country differences that have significant implications for future efforts to improve pre-primary quality. Using VCE to investigate perspectives on quality can yield specific, actionable, and policy-relevant data. VCE pairs well with CCS because it is an inherently comparative methodology and shares some common assumptions with CCS. In carrying out this research, I did not find any contradictions between the two. The idea that VCE can be used to create a “virtual conversation” (Tobin et al., 2013, p. 24) among stakeholders in distinct social and geographic locations is wellaligned with the CCS approach. CCS provides a framework for analyzing these virtual conversations to reveal global, national, and local dimensions of policy enactment. A challenge of CCS is that it may lead to the design of projects that are large and require considerable time and resources to carry out (Bartlett & Vavrus, 2017). In my experience, VCE amplifies this because of the time required to create and edit video footage. Researchers, particularly those

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doing international fieldwork, should consider whether they have the resources to make multiple trips to the research site to identify sites and participants, obtain research permissions, film in classrooms, and conduct VCE focus groups or interviews. It is also important to consider the resources involved in producing videos; in this study, I had the resources to hire professional videographers in Tanzania, but I did spend considerable time teaching myself how to edit video footage.

New Directions In this chapter, I discussed how I paired the CCS approach with video-cued ethnography to understand Tanzanian stakeholder perspectives on ECE quality in relation to the globally circulating ideas about quality reflected in the MELQO tool. As I have demonstrated in my discussion, VCE and CCS complement each other well because they share a similar theoretical grounding. In my study, CCS provided a framework for considering the different types of comparisons that would be beneficial to generating robust understanding of how diverse stakeholders in Tanzania conceptualize pre-primary quality. VCE enabled me to surface insights about quality that were more nuanced than institutional discourses about resource constraints and pedagogy that are so often recycled in conversations about quality. My analysis also revealed withincountry differences in how stakeholders were making sense of barriers to quality instruction. Though subtle, these differences have significant implications for policy and practice, and likely would not have surfaced through traditional interviews. This study showcases the considerable affordances of employing video-cued ethnography in a comparative case study and represents an innovative approach to conducting a comparative case study remotely.

Discussion Questions 1

2

Wilinski argues that video-cued ethnography (VCE) is an ideal research method for comparing policymakers’ and teachers’ views on the central phenomenon in a CCS, such as “quality” in her chapter, because VCE reveals in real time the conditions of teaching that policymakers may ignore. What are some of the most vivid examples of the constraints on implementing quality instruction in Tanzanian early childhood education classes, and what did they reveal about the supposedly universal applicability of the Measuring Early Learning Quality and Outcomes (MELQO) tool? This research project took place during the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic, and Wilinski had to make some difficult decisions during the data collection phase of the study. What does she describe as the affordances and difficulties of these adjustments? What broader lessons about the necessity of emergent design does this chapter provide for your own research?

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Although Wilinski does not address the question of generalizability in her study, she does note that VCE ethnography generates a very large amount of data across different sites and scales. She avers that this “might lead to a researcher generating more data than they are able to analyze or generating a data set that is so complex it becomes overwhelming to analyze.” What strategies did Wilinski use to avoid this problem, and how does the emphasis in the CCS approach on tracing a phenomenon potentially help to address this challenge?

References Adair, J. K., & Kurban, F. (2019). Video-cued ethnographic data collection as a tool toward participant voice. Anthropology & Education Quarterly, 50(30), 313–332. Altinyelken, H. K. (2010). Pedagogical renewal in sub-Saharan Africa: The case of Uganda. Comparative Education, 46(2), 151–171. https://doi.org/10.1080/03050061003775454. Anderson, K., & Sayre, R. (2016). Measuring early learning quality and outcomes in Tanzania (Issue October). Brookings Institution. Bartlett, L., Dowd, A. J., & Jonason, C. (2015). Problematizing early grade reading: Should the post-2015 agenda treasure what is measured? International Journal of Educational Development, 40, 308–314. Bartlett, L., & Vavrus, F. (2017). Rethinking case study research: A comparative approach. Routledge. Bowen, G. A. (2009). Document analysis as a qualitative research method. Qualitative Research Journal, 9(2), 27–40. Davis, D., Miller, D., Mrema, D., Matsoai, M., Mapetla, N., Raikes, A., & Burton, A. (2021). Understanding perceptions of quality among early childhood education stakeholders in Tanzania and Lesotho: A multiple qualitative case study. Social Sciences & Humanities Open, 4(1), 100153. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ssaho.2021.100153. Duncan, G. J., Dowsett, C. J., Claessens, A., Magnuson, K., Huston, A. C., Klebanov, P., … Japel, C. (2007). School readiness and later achievement. Developmental Psychology, 43(6), 1428–1446. Emerson, R. M., Fretz, R. I., & Shaw, L. L. (2011). Writing ethnographic fieldnotes. University of Chicago Press. Gormley, W. T., & Phillips, D. (2005). The effects of universal pre-K in Oklahoma: Research highlights and policy implications. The Policy Studies Journal, 33(1), 65–82. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1541-0072.2005.00092.x. Graue, E., Ryan, S., Wilinski, B., Northey, K., & Nocera, A. (2018). What guides pre-K programs?. Teacher College Record, 120(8), 1–36. Kejo, S. M. (2017). Exploring play in early years education: Beliefs and practices of preprimary educators in Tanzania. University of Victoria. Klees, S. J., Samoff, J., & Stromquist, N. (2012). The World Bank and education: Critiques and alternatives. Sense Publishers. Leyva, D., Weiland, C., Iscte-iul, D. L., & Snow, C. (2015). Teacher – child interactions in Chile and their associations with prekindergarten outcomes. Child Development, 86(3), 781–799. https://doi.org/10.1111/cdev.12342. Mashburn, A. J., Pianta, R. C., Hamre, B. K., Downer, J. T., Barbarin, O. A., Bryant, D., … Howes, C. (2008). Measures of classroom quality in prekindergarten and

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children’s development of academic, language, and social skills. Child Development, 79(3), 732–749. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-8624.2008.01154.x. MELQO Global Team. (2018). Measure of early learning environment (MELE): Manual. https://www.ecdmeasure.org/what-is-melqo/. Miles, M. B., Huberman, A. M., & Saldaña, J. (2014). Qualitative data analysis: A methods sourcebook. Sage. Moland, N. A. (2017). Localizing play-based pedagogy: Nigerian educators’ appropriation of Sesame Classroom materials. Global Education Review, 4(3), 17–36. Pramling-Samuelsson, I., & Fleer, M. (2009). Play and learning in early childhood settings. Springer. Raikes, A., Koziol, N., Davis, D., & Burton, A. (2020). Measuring quality of preprimary education in sub-Saharan Africa: Evaluation of the Measuring Early Learning Environments scale. Early Childhood Research Quarterly, 53, 571–585. Schweisfurth, M., & Elliott, J. (2019). When ‘best practice’ meets the pedagogical nexus: Recontextualisation, reframing and resilience. Comparative Education, 55(1), 1–8. Shore, C., & Wright, S. (Eds.). (1997). Anthropology of policy: Critical perspectives on governance and power. Routledge. Sutton, M., & Levinson, B. A. U. (2001). Policy as practice: Toward a comparative sociocultural analysis of educational policy. Ablex Publishing. Tobin, J. (2005). Quality in early childhood education: An anthropologist’s perspective. Early Education & Development, 16(4), 421–434. Tobin, J. (2019). The origins of the video-cued multivocal ethnographic method. Anthropology & Education Quarterly, 50(30), 255–269. Tobin, J., Arzubiaga, A., & Adair, J. K. (2013). Children crossing borders: Immigrant parent and teacher perspectives on preschool for children of immigrants. Russell Sage Foundation. Tobin, J., Hsueh, Y., & Karasawa, M. (2009). Preschool in three cultures revisited: China, Japan, and the United States. University of Chicago Press. Tobin, J., Wu, D. Y. H., & Davidson, D. H. (1989). Preschool in three cultures: Japan, China, and the United States. Yale University Press. UNESCO. (2017). MELQO: Measuring early learning quality and outcomes (Overview). https://www.brookings.edu/wp-content/uploads/2017/06/melqo-measuring-ea rly-learning-quality-outcomes.pdf. Vavrus, F. (2009). The cultural politics of constructivist pedagogies: Teacher education reform in the United Republic of Tanzania. International Journal of Educational Development, 29(3), 303–311. Wilinski, B. (2017). Knowing and interpreting prekindergarten policy: A Bakhtinian analysis. Education Policy Analysis Archives, 25(27). Wilinski, B. (2018). “To tell you the truth, I did not choose early childhood education”: Narratives of becoming a pre-primary teacher in Tanzania. Teaching and Teacher Education, 69, 33–42. Wilinski, B., & Morley, A. (2019). “Parent leadership and voice”: How mid-level administrators appropriate pre-kindergarten parent involvement policy. Educational Policy. https://doi.org/10.1177/0895904819864441. Yahya, R. (2016). Bridging home and school: Understanding immigrant mothers’ cultural capital and concerns about play-based learning. Early Years, 36(4), 340–352.

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Yamamoto, Y., & Li, J. (2012). What makes a high-quality preschool? Similarities and differences between Chinese immigrant and European American parents’ views. Early Childhood Research Quarterly, 27(2), 306–315. Zosh, J. M., Hopkins, E. J., Jensen, H., Liu, C., Neale, D., Hirsh-Pasek, K., Solis, S. L., & Whitebread, D. (2017). Learning through play: A review of the evidence (white paper) (Issue November). The LEGO Foundation. https://www.legofoundation. com/media/1063/learning-through-play_web.pdf.

10 Visualizing Research Reflections from a Comparative Case Study of English Language Teacher Professionalism in Rwanda Leanne M. Cameron Introduction For the novice researcher, the dissertation methodology chapter—or indeed the brief methodology section of a research article—often appears ordered and systematic. The structured reporting of “what was done” after the collection and analysis of research can obscure the roughness of the research process. For a novice researcher, as I was at the start of my doctoral work, the comparative case study (CCS) approach (Bartlett & Vavrus, 2017) appeared to provide a neat organizational guide to the research environment. Even with the caveat that, as a heuristic, the approach “is not a recipe or a set of rules” (p. 7), I was fixated on visualizations of CCS designs used by other researchers (e.g., Bartlett & Vavrus, 2017, p. 3), which projected a sense of order onto the chaotic messiness of the work environment and, in my mind, was an ideal frame for illustrating the global-to-local education policy flows found throughout the Global South (Verger et al., 2018). Here, I present and reflect upon my experience in attempting to visualize and then tame the often messy, complicated research environment, including the concept of scale and the challenges in seeing myself within the case study apparatus. In this chapter, I seek to answer the following question: how did visualizations of the CCS approach constrain and/or enabled my research with a unique, multi-scalar teacher group in Rwanda? I begin with sketching the research question, my relationship with the research environment, and the theoretical tools of professionalism and discourse applied within the study. I go on to explain how I used the CCS, a process which defied simple linearity, and I elaborate on the analytical process that resulted in the key findings. I then present the most prominent discourse, that of “mindset change,” which cuts through global, national, and local levels to figure prominently into the association’s “official” understanding of professionalism. With that foundation, I reflect back upon the entire process of using the CCS approach and reconsider the challenges that I encountered. The chapter ends with a call for greater consideration of positionality and expansion of the images that we engage with for conceptualizing and visualizing our research. DOI: 10.4324/9781003216551-11

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The Case: ATER My study focused on the Association of Teachers of English in Rwanda (ATER), a voluntary professional association of Rwandan English language teachers with regional communities of practice across the country. In a voluntary professional association, fee-paying member teachers met with the common purpose of engaging in personal and collective professional development (PD) around a subject (here, English as a language), rather than being centered at a school site. In Rwanda, I had worked alongside ATER for two years (2014–2016) as a U.S. Department of State (USDOS) English Language Fellow. There, I led workshops that served as a template for PD activities within the group, helped organize national conferences, and laid down roots for more intensive engagement and support from additional USDOS English Language Fellows. Apart from occasional visits from external professionals (like myself), PD activities within the group were broadly teacher-led; they took place outside of school hours in the schools and classrooms where those teachers work. Thus, the ATER model of PD utilized existing resources and did not primarily rely on external knowledge or funds. Within the CCS framework, I identified ATER as the “local” level and primary focus of the study. ATER operates within the broader Rwandan national context, which is itself organized into a hierarchy that reflects a corporate management structure with historical roots in the pre-colonial Rwandan kingdom (Pottier, 2002). Villages are at the base of a chain that reaches to the office of the president (often nicknamed Rwanda’s CEO), envisioned as a path to direct democracy and accountability for leadership (MINECOFIN, 2007). Association activities, from the national conference to the monthly PD events, require official permission from local education and government representatives, and the association itself was only granted a charter for operation after convincing skeptical government officials that they were not a union and would remain apolitical. Teachers’ work in Rwanda is guided by top-down national policy; recent reforms have included a rapid, under-supported language shift from French to English as the medium of instruction in 2009 (Samuelson & Freedman, 2010) and the more measured (but no less radical) transition from teacher-centered to learnercentered, competency-based curriculum and pedagogy a few years later (REB, 2015). The association, which invites local non-member teachers to trainings and conferences, provides vital, ongoing training and re-skilling otherwise unavailable within schools. While most association activities attend to the local environment, the association as a corporate body and individual leaders and members within it have direct linkages with ostensibly global institutions. Thus, I traced the transversal axis of this CCS by connecting local level ATER actors to the global level populated with stakeholders from the global English language teaching (ELT) ensemble. By this, I mean those non-Rwandan organizations and individuals—including me—who provide support through funding or

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other forms, such as visiting trainers, hard or soft copies of English language teaching materials, and organizational support for carrying out conferences. Foremost among ATER’s global constellation are the U.S. Department of State and the British Council (and its partners, including the Hornby Trust). ATER is also an official affiliate of North America’s TESOL (Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages) International Association (2019) and an associate of U.K. based IATEFL (International Association of Teachers of English as a Foreign Language, 2019) the relationships are largely ceremonial rather than practical, but they bestow disciplinary “legitimacy” on the association (Cameron, 2020). Nearly all the association leaders are employed by international non-government organizations or foreign government embassies, and many have studied for Master’s degrees in the United States and United Kingdom via Fulbright or Hornby scholarships, complicating their own status as representatives solely of the local association. These connections are often leveraged to support ATER, to provide local PD activities; for select ATER members, these attachments facilitate opportunities for additional employment or overseas study and training. Thus, ATER and other English language teacher associations that I have interacted with across Sub-Saharan Africa (Cameron, 2017) could be considered multi-scalar institutions. They are self-organized groups of teachers, but they demonstrate strong material, intellectual, and financial connections with U.S. and U.K. bodies, due primarily to the influence of the English language. ATER, then, provided a suitable space to explore global, national, and local power relations and their influence on teachers, and the CCS provided a helpful frame to organize, categorize, and explore these connections.

Conceptual Framework: Professionalism and Discourse In examining ATER and the national and global constellation which surrounds it, I was interested in questions of professionalism. Put simply, teacher professionalism illustrates what it means to be a “professional” teacher. To Evans (2008), it is “an ideologically-, attitudinally, intellectually- and epistemologically-based stance on the part of an individual, in relation to the practice of the profession to which s/he belongs, and which influences her/ his professional practice” (p. 26). Individual understandings provide ontological and epistemological grounding for the teacher and the teacher’s collective; the plural of these individual professionalisms forms the amalgam of “professionality writ large” (p. 26). But at both the individual and collective level, professionalism is shot through with questions of power: Who decides what ideologies, attitudes, epistemologies, pedagogies, and practices are to be foregrounded and valued? Are teachers actively involved in those processes, or are they viewed as simply the executor of those decisions? Education scholars have proposed a bevy of taxonomies to describe teachers’ work in relation to power: In

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democratic visions of professionalism (Sachs, 2001), teachers play an active role in deciding the terms of their work and engaging with their local community; they are fairly remunerated and granted a measure of stability and autonomy. But more commonly, teachers across global contexts appear locked into forms of managerial, measured (Biesta, 2015a), and performative (Moore & Clarke, 2016) professionalism. Aligned with neoliberal market values, a good teacher according to these ideals is able to meet corporate goals, follow standardized criteria for both student and teacher outcomes, effectively manage students and the classroom, track and document achievements, and remain accountable on an individual and school-wide level to administrations, communities, and the taxpaying public (Biesta, 2015b; Cribb, 2009). Teachers’ work is confined to the classroom and school level: As employees needing management, they are viewed as unqualified to weigh in on the policies that structure their work lives. According to this view of professionalism, teachers are “accountable but powerless” (Adams, 2002, p. 218). Teachers are expected to take up and often uncritically embody these new understandings of their work, a key theme of my own findings, as I discuss later in the chapter with the presentation of “mindset change” as a key discourse within ATER. This managerial construction of teacher professionalism has particular currency among global donors and policy actors and often accompanies a spate of other policy trends. School-based management, public-private partnerships, standardized testing, reforms in teacher accountability, and increased datafication are widespread policy technologies proposed as a panacea for poor educational outcomes (Verger et al., 2018). The World Bank, as a particularly powerful policy broker, frequently levies responsibility for poor education outcomes on the performance of “unprofessional” teachers and offers the solution of more intensive teacher management and neoliberal accountability (Bashir et al., 2018; Bruns et al., 2011). These competing conceptualizations of professionalism demonstrate the unfixed nature of the term itself, and thus, I view it as discourse, understood by Foucault (2004) and Philp (1985) as something which sets the boundaries for what is thinkable and sayable. In this case, what is sayable and thinkable about the teaching profession, including the role, responsibilities, and behavior expected of the teacher. Professionalism is a site of ongoing tension and contestation as stakeholders—teachers themselves, policymakers, or international other actors—compete for dominance over who can assign its definition and shape subsequent teacher subjectivity. Powerful ideologies seek to shape understandings of professionalism to advance their form of control by undermining the validity of teacher-created expressions. Teachers themselves, caught within these environments, construct their own forms of professionalism via resistance, incorporation, or modification of these external discourses. A professional association, then, made up of teachers who engage in collective, self-driven PD, appears as a rebuttal to these claims of deficiency.

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Associations like ATER, which engage with local PD and professionalism, have received little attention in international scholarship, and the research that existed at the start of my work was siloed within the disciplines of English language teaching and applied linguistics (Gnawali, 2016; Odhiambo & Oloo, 2007; Smith & Kuchah, 2016). Within that limited literature on English professional associations, I saw little critical engagement with the postcolonial politics of English or neoliberal knowledge hierarchies, even though the associations served to link powerful global institutions and local African teachers. Thus, my research questions revolved around the influence of external professionalism discourses, and how association teachers understood, embodied, and invested in their professionalism, despite working in a profession marked by low remuneration and poor representation in policymaking and being subject to frequent, unsupported policy reforms by the federal government (Muvunyi, 2016; Williams, 2017). My research methods, then, described in the next section, worked to draw out discourses across these many levels: the global and national levels of the CCS, and the levels that existed within the local.

Data Collection Methods I employed a variety of data collection methods for this CCS, with different ones used at the local, national, and global levels. Data collection at the local level within ATER (May–August 2018) was the most comprehensive. The association operates with an executive leadership group, but most activities are separately organized through regional communities of practice (COP); at the time of research, there were seven COPs in districts across the country. Within the full association, I created levels for comparison, delineating specific association groups, including association leaders (elected to executive roles and those serving on the board of directors), community of practice leaders (association members who volunteered or were asked to take on local leadership roles), association members (attendee teachers who pay the yearly member dues), and non-member teacher attendees (local teachers who participate in COP activities without paying dues). During the data collection period with ATER, I made numerous trips to the COP locations around the country. At five of the COPs, I led workshops that employed variations of inquiry graphics (Lackovic, 2014) to encourage discussion of their understandings of professionalism. With four COP leaders, I conducted visits at their school sites, observing their individual professional practice. Those leaders also participated in multiple interviews and were provided cameras to capture aspects of their professional work to share in a final interview. I also conducted additional classroom observations and interviews with individual members and attendee teachers, and I collected materials and took field notes at several local COP events and the yearly national conference. With the leaders, I led a two-hour focus group; three of the six executive leaders also participated in one-on-one

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interviews. Finally, I collected documents from the association, including those published on their website. In tracking all of these sources, I began a rudimentary network ethnography, with a large paper tacked to the wall and bubbles drawn for each COP and for the leader group; I drew links between the COPs to illustrate members who led presentations for neighboring group events or started offshoot COPs when they moved jobs. On the outer edges of the paper, I began identifying external organizations, both Rwandan and international groups, which had relationships with individual members or participated in ATER events, and it soon became evident that many participants in the study were networked in local communities, across locations in Rwanda, and with international organizations. I began to map these connections and came to think of the work as a form of network mapping. Before, during, and after the data collection period in Rwanda, I also accessed publicly available materials around education policy, English language teaching, and Rwandan governance to flesh out the national and international levels. The mapping of Rwandan policy was straightforward, given the nation’s propensity to publish policy in English online, but the process of investigating the global level was far more complex. When starting the Ph.D., I had initially chosen to look at the publications and policies of international organizations (IO) and those from U.S. and U.K. government and semi-governmental agencies, all of which act as multilateral donors and thus strongly influence domestic education decision-making (Swedlund, 2013). Therefore, documentation from the World Bank and other organizations with similar fiscal and policymaking clout figured heavily into my mapping of the global level. I also traced global-level connections through ATER, like references to non-Rwandan universities, INGOs, and other organizations, including TESOL International Association, IATEFL, British Council, and various USDOS branches, as those global entities appeared strongly linked with the local experience of teachers. Reference to “taken-for-granted” best practices, techniques, and activities known to the discipline, such as emphasis on oral communicative practice, group activities, and other so-called “learner-centered” practices, were especially represented in local data, and so I examined academic literature along with realia; for example, I sought out course overviews and reading lists from the Global North university programs where association leaders had studied and materials from the international conferences they had attended. Through this process, especially in combing through the data for references to external bodies, my own impact on ATER was clear. Aspects of how the association ran, such as how monthly trainings were structured or which activities were frequently foregrounded, or what was featured in the yearly national conference, were often directly and explicitly linked back to me and it made me profoundly aware of my own impact within the group. Members related that trainings I had led influenced their practice. Looking

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back, it was clear that my direct instruction of association teachers emphasized taken-for-granted TESOL pedagogies, such as communicative language teaching, learner-centeredness, and the primacy of spoken language. But within my methodological frame, it was unclear how I, as a significant “discourse carrier” (Cameron, 2020) who normalized external professionalism practices, fit into my mental conceptualization of the comparative case study levels, a challenge I discuss later in the chapter.

Data Analysis To analyze the data, I followed Rose’s (2001) steps for carrying out Foucauldian discourse analysis. First, starting several months after the period in Rwanda, I approached the data with fresh eyes and without existing thematic codes, following Rose’s suggestion to immerse yourself in the data. I went through each transcript, ethnographic entry, and policy document multiple times, developing emerging themes, and then went online to search for instances in popular media. In this middle stage, themes which emerged included epistemic neutrality, individualism, the professional development “imperative,” and the “correct” ways to teach English and perform as an English teacher. I also looked for what was not spoken. If discourse forms the boundaries for what is thinkable and sayable, what is not being expressed or broached? For instance, was some pertinent issue discussed in one level and not another, as with issues of pay and renumeration, which figured prominently in more than one COP training discussion but wasn’t discussed within the leader focus group? As new questions emerged, I returned to recode as many times as needed. I began to identify recurrences and emerging keywords in member data, and then I tracked those phrases across national and global level documentation. The tasks of data collection and analysis were dynamic and interconnected, and I unwittingly employed the techniques of network ethnography, as described by Ball and Junemann (2013). This meant that I was conducting “extensive and exhaustive internet searches” (p. 12) on the nongovernment organizations and “following processes, practices, discourses, technologies and networks, thereby connecting sites, scales and subjects” (Peck & Theodore, 2012, p. 171). To keep track of the network of external organizations, businesses, and government bodies connected with the full association, the COPs, or the individual members, I built a network map to visualize the relationships. Since the start of my work, I had clung to the linear and hierarchical visualization of the CCS often pictured in methodological writing (e.g., Bartlett & Vavrus, 2017, p. 3); the visual presented a sort of roadmap or template that a novice researcher could populate when sketching the features of the research environment. But the network mapping that resulted from my renewed attempt to visualize relationships and connections became itself part of the analytical process, reorienting the way I internally envisioned the environment (see Figure 10.1).

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As a tool that emerged through the process of data analysis, my network ethnography cannot be considered a complete and comprehensive mapping of the research environment. When I began with software (Kumu.io) that allowed me to illustrate the research environment, I only sought to better visualize the many national and global entities that were connected either with the association as a whole or individual members within ATER. The mapping grew in size—illustrating organizations within Rwanda, across the African continent, and across the globe— and the linkages indicated multiple connections, including jobs, relationships, and trainings undertaken that were mentioned in interviews, focus groups, and throughout the COP trainings, and they could represent both unidirectional or bidirectional relationships. Over time, there were multiple iterations of the map as I tried, perhaps with inadequate software, to hone the map to delineate those specific connections. In that process, I struggled with the questions that confront network ethnography as an approach: Was I flattening the ever-changing landscape of relationships and networks, and not properly accounting for the different levels and types of operations undertaken by the diverse organizations listed? At that stage, however, what I gained from this mapping was the exercise of reorienting my thinking away from hierarchy. By the end of the process, the association had become the center of the graphic, rather than the bottom row of an organizational chart, and it became clear that many of those seemingly global entities depended upon

Figure 10.1 Detail of Full Network Mapping Based on Relationships and Networks of Association Members. Note: This visual, and the one in Figure 10.2, was constructed using the online tool Kumu.io.

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the association’s support to carry out work in Rwanda, complicating my earlier assumptions of the one-way flow of power (from global to local) within the relationship. In Figure 1, a piece of that much larger image is presented, with ATER as the center bubble. Visual tools further assisted in drawing out key discourses within the association. I initially began coding using NVivo software but quickly became frustrated: Inductive coding, especially with the amount of data I had assembled, resulted in dozens of codes which seemed to multiply and overlap with each piece of data I processed. When I looked at the results, the codes seemed flat and far removed from their initial context. Overwhelmed, I printed all the transcripts of focus groups and interviews and my fieldnotes, and began to hand code with colored highlighters. Following on from the network mapping, I started to create visual maps of the data sources (see Figure 10.2). At the time, I was struggling with what importance to give to seemingly individual utterances—if one COP leader mentioned “personal responsibility,” for example, how many similar utterances from other members or leaders was needed for me to label it as a discourse? Thus, while this mapping helped to solve one set of problems in organizing my data, it introduced others, including, as I discuss later, the issue of “flattening.” In response, I began to note the spaces where those utterances occurred: In an individual interview, a community leader would necessarily express his own opinion. But in a workshop, with multiple members present, the idea could be contested, negotiated, or affirmed. Thus, the agreement of other members would indicate more accepted, normalized ideas; the professionalism workshops circled in Figure 10.2 below indicate two data collection events where this negotiation of ideas indicated strong member discourses around personal responsibility for paying one’s own event transportation costs. Through this visual, I noticed other spaces where a different form of discourse dissemination occurred: where leaders spoke to other members or

Figure 10.2 Detail from Data Mapping to Determine More Influential Spaces for Discourse Dissemination

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members shared openly. The speeches from the conferences, circled in Figure 10.2, appeared as powerful spaces for discourse dispersal, since the leaders addressed the entire association and non-member teachers. I could then trace those same signifiers and concepts to later references by COP leaders and members during interviews, and so I came to see these speeches as very powerful and significant expressions of leader values and discourses.

Key Findings From the extended analysis process, several primary discursive strands were identified, with differing uptake, deployment, and contestation at each level of the case study, with one key, overarching finding that is explained here. To account for the differences between association levels (explained earlier in Data Collection Methods), I refer to “valued” professionalism, which denotes the form of professionalism emphasized especially by association and COP leaders, which frequently contrasted with the expressions of professionalism at the member and non-member attendee levels of the association. Valued professionalism within the association requires that teachers undergo a personal transformation, what association and COP leaders label a “mindset change” to shift from a fixed to a growth mindset (see below). For leaders, fixed mindset teachers would assume that they had already acquired all knowledge needed for their work; they would lack intrinsic motivation to change or improve and would assume that the Rwandan government or other organizations—INGOs, foreign governments, or the like— would shoulder the financial costs for supporting their PD. Conversely, a growth mindset teacher would take responsibility for their own PD, continually upgrade their pedagogical and content knowledge, and engage actively within the association. They would invest their money and time in growing and developing their PD portfolio to align with policy mandates and thus take ownership of their own professionalism, with the association as the conduit for engagement. Teacher members who adopted this mindset and demonstrated altruistic engagement with the association became eligible for the rewards available there or through association network connections. For instance, the leaders would put forward their names when the U.S. Embassy sought program participants or posted lucrative weekend teaching jobs. The association could also support applications for United States or United Kingdom-based scholarships for further studies or conference attendance. These teachers thus demonstrated the characteristics of an English teacher desired in global institutions. Able to be creative and critical, they were seen as teachers able to perform beyond the limited Rwandan teacher paradigm and function instead on a global platform. With the comparative case study, I had an approach for investigating the deployment of the “mindset change” signifier at national and global levels and examining the relationships which linked to the local level. The specific

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binary of fixed and growth mindsets used by association leaders appears in the work of American psychologist Carol Dweck (2006), elaborated in her book Mindset: The New Psychology of Success. Her work, centered in disciplinary norms of psychology, posits a universal, flexible ontology wherein the individual has the ability (and perhaps the responsibility) to undergo an internal change to achieve the life they desire. Rather than focus on injustices, inequalities, and barriers in the external world, mindset change focuses on what can be changed within to better cope with or navigate the outside world; it is a concept that aligns strongly with neoliberal notions of the individual as a rational actor who functions like “a miniature firm, responding to incentives, rationally assessing risks, and prudently choosing among different courses of action” (Ferguson, 2010, p. 172). There are myriad references to the need for mindset change across Rwandan national sources. I located early examples of its use in reference to national reconciliation and social cohesion in rebuilding Rwandan society following the genocide (Purdekova, 2012). In more recent policy documents and official speeches, it takes on an economic angle, where fixed mindsets are presented as a barrier to implementing the changes needed for Rwandan development. Rwandan youths are said to lack the correct mindset to be self-reliant and entrepreneurial (MINECOFIN, 2007), and teachers are presented as unwilling to implement ICT policy because of their mindsets (MINEDUC, 2016). In President Paul Kagame’s speeches, mindset change is presented as the key to economic progress (Kagame, 2019; Tashobya, 2016), and a lack of mindset change can be blamed when leaders fail to meet development targets (Mwai, 2019). Ansoms (2008, 2013) and others, without pointing to the specific mindset change signifier, indicate worrying developments in the country wherein poverty is being recast as an individual failing, allowing the government to relinquish responsibility, a hallmark of neoliberal responsibilization wherein the government may “respond to the sufferer as if they were the author of their own misfortune” (Pyysiäinen et al., 2017, p. 216). The mindset signifier, then, is a clear vehicle for conveying this shift in responsibility. Across the levels, the signifier was deployed by different powerful entities. Dweck’s research, bearing the legitimacy of psychological research with its ontologically neutral scientific tools, indicates power in determining possibilities for the self. From the Rwandan government, the signifier sensitizes citizens on how they are to demonstrate their loyalty and commitment to the Rwandan development project and convinces them of the active, individual role they must take in implementing government policy. Association leaders, rather than pushing back on the onerous reforms expected of teachers, maintain neutrality and offer a seemingly sustainable, community-based solution to the lack of ongoing training and teacher support. Against a backdrop of discourses which demean and disempower teachers across the continent (and indeed the world), the association’s valorization of a certain type of professional appears empowering for teachers in recognizing their capabilities and work ethic.

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But this form of professionalism was not universally taken up within the association. My findings noted significant pushback by member teachers and non-member attendee teachers, especially those from rural and underserved, under-resourced school sites. Teachers there argued for fair pay and ongoing training, with their complaints subtly targeting the education system, rather than the association. COP leaders from those areas also indicated that teachers’ requests for money to attend trainings was not a sign of greed or an indicator of fixed mindset, as some others in the association suggested, but born out of the poverty and need. This rebuttal demonstrates the limits of mindset change and neoliberal responsibilization. When poor pay keeps teachers trapped at the base of a hierarchy of needs (Muvunyi, 2016), those individuals will be unable to look beyond immediate physiological concerns, fueling a cycle of “deprofessionalisation and diminished self-esteem” (Pryor, 1998, p. 222).

My Research within the CCS Approach Reflecting back on my doctoral research, I can now see the winding journey that I took through the work. Metcalfe (2016) defined methodology as “a self-aware onto-epistemological approach to the research process, informed by theory and experience” (p. 80), but to this, I can add that self-awareness, understandings of my own assumptions of ontology and epistemology, and the navigating of that process often emerge through the experience, rather than existing prior to starting it. While I initially assumed that the CCS approach would provide a template that I could populate with data sources, it is meant to function as a heuristic, a “method that comes from experience and aids in the process of discovery or problem-solving” (Bartlett & Vavrus, 2017, p. 7). It allows us to seek and discover, and the work of research forces you to experience the heuristic. My primary challenge with the CCS approach was one that has been identified and documented by other scholars, namely, the problem of bracketing out an individual or group and assigning them to the local, national, or global level. In challenging the vertical case study iteration of the CCS, Robertson (2018) was concerned that the levels can become over-stratified and ignore that individuals and organizations can have “local and global horizons of origin” (p. 42). In my work, I struggled to balance this in that association leaders’ work and education strongly mirrored my own. Many of them worked in international organizations or foreign country embassies; their colleagues were Rwandan, European, and American. Like me, they held Master’s degrees in TESOL or Applied Linguistics, and as former English language teachers, we shared a common understanding of the assumptions and practices of the TESOL field. Their networks bloomed both outward (to national government and global institutions) and inward (to association COPs and their schools). Did they count, then, as “true” examples of the local? Who was a

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“true” example of a local? A Rwandan teacher working in a rural school, who had no previous interactions or relationships with institutions like the U.K.’s Voluntary Service Organization or the Peace Corps? Similarly, would the entire discipline of psychology or linguistics, for example, exist at the “global” level, if Rwandan individuals and groups were not involved in its construction? Was learner-centered pedagogy another global-level intervention, and the existing Rwandan educational pedagogy of teacher-centeredness, itself argued to be a remnant of Belgian colonial intervention (King, 2014), an example of a local one? In assuming that these pedagogies, disciplines, and concepts were necessarily foreign to the Rwandan context, was I reifying assumptions of the dominance of Global North exports and the tacit passivity of Rwandan teachers? Thus, it became clear that I was taking on two different, and perhaps unfeasible, problems: the problem of scale, in who belongs at each level, and the problem of origin versus circulation. An individual or form of knowledge might emerge at one point of origin within the scales, but once they begin to circulate, what scale do they continue to represent? My obsession with labeling is perhaps a carryover from the positivist research approaches that dominated my earlier studies, but it does speak to a key tension within social science research—the desire to create boundaries and divide social groups in order to make inquiry possible, while struggling with how those boundaries and labels cannot fully account for the complexity of contexts. We may acknowledge the multiple horizons that each human possesses, but we can also interrogate our data and participants to understand where they might place themselves. With Dweck’s work, a popular publication rooted in the psychological discipline which holds that universal truths about the human condition can be uncovered with appropriate methodology, speaks at a global level. Here, “global” can mean both cosmopolitan and multinational (or, Global North) but also global as in the discipline itself assumes that it speaks for a global, shared ontology. In other words, the truth of psychological research in the United States is unmoored from context and speaks to the “ultimate truth” of the global whole. ATER leaders conveyed to me again and again their position that they did not want to foreground their work for non-Rwandan entities. Perhaps, for a different comparative case study, they would have been placed at a different level, depending on the focus. However, within the CCS approach, horizontal comparison at the local level allows us to account for diversity of experience, reminding us that there is no one true Rwandan teacher or association member, just as there is no one true Rwandan experience. Even with these tenuous proposals, I still struggled with my own positionality within ATER and within the research. From the local level data, it was apparent that I had been highly influential in shaping the operations of the group. I recognize that in my original role as a Fellow, I represented the expertise of the English language teaching field. It seemed to me that certain

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teachers took up the activities that I had introduced, and I witnessed those teachers use the same activities at COP events and the national conference. During my work with the association, I often struggled with being labeled an expert. I felt keenly unqualified to answer questions that were often posed to me, such as a teacher asking how to deploy communitive language activities in a classroom of 80 students, when I had never taught language classes larger than 30. Moreover, I didn’t agree with the sweeping policies enacted, such as the English language shift or move to competency-based learning, but as a practitioner on the ground, I wanted to give the teachers practical tools for coping with the change, knowing that they had no recourse for protesting the radical reforms that impacted their working lives (Rubagiza et al., 2017; Tolon, 2014). In the data, I could see markers of my previous work as a trainer, linking local participants with global entities, be they activities commonplace in U.S.-based English teaching, pedagogical approaches built out of Global North education research like Bloom’s Taxonomy, USDOS-produced resources, or U.S. and U.K. teacher networks. From my own experience, I understood the position of the association, and probably even deployed the individualizing, mindset change language around ownership of professionalism and taking responsibility for one’s own professional learning that I later decried in my research (Cameron, 2020, 2021). Then, during my period of engagement as a practitioner, I felt that with few other resources, mobilization through the association was one of the few routes to support teachers, and the only way to ensure engagement was to convince teachers of the need to engage in personal PD. As a representative of a USDOS program, my opinion was likely valorized, taken up, and treated as representative of professionalism within the purported home of the English language teaching discipline: The Global North. Seeing myself and the association leaders as bridging individuals helped break me out of the need to clearly define and delimit each participant and level. It also shook my assumption that within the CCS approach, the global level would be modulated through the national level—as with the World Bank’s preferred pedagogies and approaches being grafted onto Rwandan education policy. Association leaders and people like me, as in-person carriers of global discourse, were effective in embodying and legitimizing Rwandan policy and government discourse. Towards this realization, comparative education scholar Joan DeJaeghere offered a key insight at the CIES 2021 conference panel where many of these chapter contributions originated. In dealing with the many global entanglements present at each level of the CCS, she commented that we need to determine if we are simply “tracing/following policies” or “whether entanglement is presumed and therefore we don’t seek to differentiate these levels, but rather document the entanglements as well as frictions.” At the start of my doctoral work, I was unknowingly attempting to both differentiate levels for policy flow and document entanglements and frictions. But, by the end, I was instead investigating those entanglements as conduits for discourse transfer.

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Foucault (1984) spoke of engaging with the limits that have been historically imposed upon us and encouraged readers to “experiment with the possibility of going beyond them” (p. 50). Rightly or not, the image of the axes of the CCS approach had set the bounds for my intellectual visualization of the space where I worked and created further boundaries for how I understood the research environment. Small changes to the platform where analysis was conducted—moving from NVivo to hand coding or using visual mapping approaches—can have a great impact, even though each change will also bring its own set of new challenges and limitations. Academic research privileges the written and spoken word, which function as the primary—and expected and valued—modes through which we disseminate our work. Just as I wanted to give my participants a diversity of modes for expressing themselves and presenting their reality, I myself needed ways enliven the data, bringing energy back into interviews, arguments, and discussions that had been reduced to flat black-and-white transcripts loaded into NVivo. This move was inspired in part by Nick Sousanis’ (2015) exquisite visual thesis about how our thinking, through human history, has been bound by the systems that we use—language, writing—and how we have been unable to fully explore the visual aspect of our perception. He argued that “deprivileging this absolute vantage point opens up the world” (p. 36). However, as I have indicated, it was an imperfect turn, and my initial assumptions that this visual approach “unflattened” the data led to a new set of challenges and a different form of flattening and codifying connections within a dynamic human network.

New Directions Even since starting my doctoral work in 2016, examples of the CCS approach in different research contexts have proliferated, as the chapters in this book demonstrate. Taken together, these chapters show the limited utility of a methodological guide absent its deployment in practice. As I have noted throughout this chapter, a methodology as a heuristic can be read about, but to be truly understood, it needs to be experienced, and there is only so much labor that books, guides, and texts such as this chapter can do. My own struggles, including my over-reliance on labels and levels, and my struggle to define my own role within the case study, demonstrate directions for moving forward with this useful approach to research. As with my own experiments in the data analysis process, I suggest the need for new context visualizations which are not built upon hierarchy or depict the global level as the top or head of an organizational chart. Though these mappings can be helpful to readers, the visual shorthand of such images can lay invisible mental boundaries around who represents what aspects of the CCS, and so they are imperfect solutions to illustrating data. This problem is also a personal one, and one that each researcher needs to be aware of, especially researchers looking to employ the CCS approach, as

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it is impossible to create a single image to fully demonstrate what a comparative case study is supposed to do or look like. Rather, as researchers, we can strive to have multiple ways to present visuals to capture our research environments. And looking ahead, more expanded visual approaches—not only in data collection, but in the organization and analysis of that data— may provide directions tools for deprivileging the vantage points that we form early on in the research process, or those that we have carried within us from our epistemic cultures. Similarly, we need ongoing engagement with positionality and consideration of how we do, or don’t, fit into the levels that we examine, and how our work as researchers is another form of entanglement to document within our work.

Discussion Questions 1

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In her analysis of teacher professionalism within the Association of Teachers of English in Rwanda (ATER), Cameron discusses some of the challenges of delineating scales in a CCS and how she sought to address them. What would a conventional delineation of scales have looked like in this study (i.e., local, national, and international)? What would have been revealed and obscured by such a delineation? Cameron contends that visualizations of CCS designs typically depict distinct levels of analysis, but these do not adequately account for participants and researchers like herself who are simultaneously local and global actors. What role do diagrams and visualizations play in helping us understand abstract concepts like comparison or scale? How might they underrepresent the messiness of CCS research? By working at different scales, a vertical comparison confronts assumptions of a shared ontology. For example, Cameron challenges a presumably “global, shared ontology” and “ultimate truth of the global whole” by comparing local actors’ views and experiences with concepts like “mindsets.” How might your study engage data collected at different sociospatial scales to challenge a concept considered universally valid?

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Ministry of Finance and Economic Planning (MINECOFIN), Republic of Rwanda. (2007). Economic development and poverty reduction strategy II. https://planipolis. iiep.unesco.org/sites/default/files/ressources/rwanda_edprs_2008-2012.pdf. Moore, A., & Clarke, M. (2016). ‘Cruel optimism’: Teacher attachment to professionalism in an era of performativity. Journal of Education Policy, 31(5), 666–677. https://doi.org/10.1080/02680939.2016.1160293. Muvunyi, E. (2016). Teacher motivation and incentives in Rwanda: Analysis of stakeholders’ perceptions of the changes in teachers’ motivation during 2008–2013 [Unpublished Ed.D. thesis]. University of Sussex. Mwai, C. (2019, February 26). Kagame to Southern Province leaders: Serving people is not a favour to them. The New Times. https://www.newtimes.co.rw/news/kagamesouthern-province. Odhiambo, F., & Oloo, D. (2007). ELTED around the world: Sharing examples of existing successful practice in ELT associations in East Africa. ELTED, 10(Winter), 63–68. Peck, J., & Theodore, N. (2012). Follow the policy: A distended case approach. Environment and Planning, 44(1), 21–30. https://doi.org/10.1068/a44179. Philp, M. (1985). Michel Foucault. In Q. Skinner (Ed.), The return of grand theory in social sciences (pp. 65–81). Cambridge University Press. Pottier, J. (2002). Re-imagining Rwanda: Conflict, survival, and disinformation in the late twentieth century. Cambridge University Press. Pryor, J. (1998). Action research in West African schools: Problems and prospects. International Journal of Educational Development, 18(3), 219–228. https://doi.org/10. 1016/S0738-0593(98)00020–0 Purdekova, A. (2012). Civic education and social transformation in post- genocide Rwanda: Forging the perfect development subjects. In M. Campioni & P. Noack (Eds.), Rwanda fast forward: Social, economic, military and reconciliation prospects (pp. 192–210). Palgrave Macmillan. Pyysiäinen, J., Halpin, D., & Guilfoyle, A. (2017). Neoliberal governance and “responsibilization” of agents: Reassessing the mechanisms of responsibility-shift in neoliberal discursive environments. Distinktion: Journal of Social Theory, 18(2), 215–235. https://doi.org/10.1080/1600910X.2017.1331858. Robertson, S. L. (2018). Researching global education policy: Angles In/On/Out. In A. Verger, M. Novelli, & H. K. Altinyelken (Eds.), Global education policy and international development: New agendas, issues and policies (2nd ed., pp. 35–54). Bloomsbury. Rose, G. (2001). Visual methods: An introduction to the interpretation of visual methods. Sage. Rubagiza, J., Umutoni, J., & Kaleeba, A. (2017). Teachers as agents of change: Promoting peacebuilding and social cohesion in schools in Rwanda. Education as Change, 20(3). https://doi.org/10.17159/1947-9417/2016/1533. Rwanda Education Board (REB), Ministry of Education, Republic of Rwanda. (2015). Competence-based curriculum: Summary of curriculum framework pre-primary to upper secondary 2015. https://elearning.reb.rw/pluginfile.php/28040/mod_resource/ content/1/CURRICULUM_FRAMEWORK_FINAL.pdf. Sachs, J. (2001). Teacher professional identity: Competing discourses, competing outcomes. Journal of Education Policy, 16(2), 149–161. https://doi.org/10.1080/ 02680930116819.

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11 Negotiating the Purposes of Early Childhood Education and Care Alex Klapperich

Introduction Early childhood education and care (ECEC)1 could be imagined as a place for play, curiosity, and friendship or a public good that all families can depend on to educate and look after their children. In recent years, governments, politicians, social policy scholars (Esping-Andersen, 2002), economists (Heckman, 2011; Rolnick & Grunewald, 2003), and international nongovernmental organizations have rallied around a vision of ECEC as a productive investment that will yield future social and economic returns. This investment discourse has such a dominant place in international policy discourse that it has assumed the status of “folklore” (Campbell-Barr, 2012, p. 424). According to investment discourse, ECEC helps children develop human capital through receiving the basic knowledge and skills deemed necessary for a socially and economically productive future (Esping-Andersen, 2002). Proponents of investment discourse are particularly concerned that experiencing poverty will limit children’s human capital development and restrict their future life chances (Esping-Andersen, 2002). This lends to arguments that funding for ECEC is most effective and renders the highest return when targeted towards families with low-incomes (Heckman, 2011). This investment discourse is pervasive in ECEC policy reform in the United States, including in the state of Minnesota, where four-year-olds have become the state’s youngest forms of human capital. Over the past two decades, politicians in Minnesota have debated whether increased public expenditure on ECEC is warranted, and whether to fund targeted or universal access to ECEC. Despite these debates, Minnesota’s policy coalition, including Minnesotan business community leaders, politicians, and non-governmental organizations, have coalesced around a representation of ECEC as a mechanism to build a competitive labor market and advance the “academic success” of students from racialized and low-income backgrounds. This chapter begins with a review of how members of Minnesota’s ECEC policy coalition perpetuate investment discourse and represent children through a deficit lens, while burdening them with immense personal and social responsibility. I then contrast policymakers’ representation of children DOI: 10.4324/9781003216551-12

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and their education with the insights I gleaned from conversations with students, educators, and parents about their perspectives regarding pre–K. Students discussed important norms, places, and activities in pre–K, and prioritized art, dramatic play, and strategies to navigate complex emotions and relationships. Meanwhile, my conversations with two parents and a pre– K educator provided insights as to how investment discourse is negotiated in ECEC practice, as they expressed some support for this discourse, while also highlighting its limitations. Next, I suggest the benefits of comparison across groups of social actors and reflect on opportunities to utilize the New Sociology of Childhood (NSC) and Critical Narrative Analysis (CNA) to complement the CCS approach. I conclude by highlighting considerations and possibilities for including children’s perspectives in future CCS research.

Literature Review Framing ECEC as an economic investment may garner political support from unlikely sources, such as the business community. However, investment discourse recasts ECEC from a public good and basic entitlement to a technical intervention, oriented towards efficiency and economic productivity (Moss, 2014). The emphasis underlying investment discourse on yielding future economic returns alters ECEC practice to achievement-based teaching that privileges children from white, middle-class backgrounds (Brown, 2019). This cultivates a “manufactured crisis” (Brown, 2019, p. 10) in public education, whereby children of color and children from families with low-incomes are perceived to be falling behind their white, middle-class peers (Pérez, 2019). In addition, they are often restricted from enriching learning opportunities in favor of promoting “basic education” (Dudley-Marling, 2019). The increased focus on standardization also undermines educators’ capacity to implement curricula that reflect students’ unique needs, identities, and interests (Brown, 2019). Investment discourse reinforces education practices that reproduce education disparities by restricting children from marginalized backgrounds from the curriculum, support, and opportunities that could actually forge equal outcomes. Investment discourse not only constrains ECEC policy and practice, but it also influences the social construction of childhood. Moss (2014) highlights how investment discourse offers a dehumanizing and “impoverished image of the child as a reservoir of future capital” and as “passive and incompetent” (p. 45). This deficit frame is routinely applied to children and families experiencing economic hardship and racialization (Dudley-Marling, 2019; Pérez, 2019). Investment discourse focuses on identifying and remediating children’s perceived deficiencies in order to generate adults who are personally responsible for their welfare and economically productive (Moss, 2014). In order to render higher returns on ECEC as a public investment, children are expected to surpass developmental milestones at earlier ages (Kašcˇ ák & Pupala, 2013). These expectations pressure children to be “competitive, individualised, risk-embracing being(s), capable of exceeding (themselves)”

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(Kašcˇ ák & Pupala, 2013, p. 20). Here, I employ Rose’s (1999) concept of responsibilization, which occurs as political subjects are increasingly positioned as responsible for their own outcomes, which includes meeting their basic needs. Through these processes, individuals become more reliant on the self and less reliant on the welfare state. This construction of childhood radically departs from a more empowering view of children as whole, complex beings with boundless potential and meaningful relationships (Dudley-Marling, 2019). Despite how intimately ECEC policy reform impacts young children, their perspectives are absent from ECEC policy discourse—in Minnesota and elsewhere—and children are virtually absent from research regarding how ECEC policy affects their lives. I am inspired by the previous, yet limited, research that has engaged young students’ perspectives regarding transitions to school (Dockett & Perry, 2005; Tatlow-Golden et al., 2016), quality in education (Einarsdottir, 2005), and the value of education (Marshall, 2016). Children’s perspectives in these areas highlight some of the limitations of the human capital development frame (Marshall, 2016). The research presented in this chapter builds on this previous research by applying the CCS approach to compare how policymakers, students, parents, and a teacher represent pre–K in Minnesota, where investment discourse is pervasive.

Theoretical Framework: New Sociology of Childhood In this chapter, I draw on the New Sociology of Childhood to compare children’s perspectives on ECEC with their teacher, parents, and Minnesota policymakers. NSC offers a theoretical and methodological approach that resists socialization theory and developmentalist understandings of childhood, both of which are problematic because they position children as only full beings once they reach adulthood (Lee, 2001; Matthews, 2007). NSC recognizes childhood as a social construction, holding that “children in different social locations have different childhoods and that their experience of childhood changes from one context to another” (Matthews, 2007, p. 325). Researchers who employ NSC as a framework view children as knowledge producers, social actors, and active participants in research (Levison et al., 2021; Marshall, 2016; Matthews, 2007). NSC acknowledges that children have valuable insights to share and recognizes a “democratic impetus” (Marshall, 2016, p. 59) to engage children in research and decision-making that involves them rather than relying on adults to anticipate and represent children’s priorities and experiences.

Research Design Applying CCS I was drawn to comparative case study research as the methodological approach for this study due to Bartlett and Vavrus’ (2017) adoption of a sociocultural understanding of policymaking and their situating of CCS within

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critical theory. Applying a sociocultural approach, they describe policymaking “as a deeply political process of cultural production engaged in and shaped by social actors” (p. 2). These social actors are conditioned by different contexts, interests, and power relations. In this way, the CCS approach is ideally suited for this study’s aim of comparing pre–K experiences and perspectives of students, parents, and educators to those of policymakers. I was also compelled by CCS’s engagement with critical theory, which seeks to interrogate power relations and injustice, and to identify “how common-sense, hegemonic notions about the social world maintain disparities of sorts” (Bartlett & Vavrus, 2017, p. 39). These commitments align with my goal of employing comparative research to explore and destabilize taken-for-granted assumptions regarding ECEC’s primary purpose as an economic investment rather than as a public good. The CCS’s horizontal, vertical, and transversal axes of comparison open opportunities to challenge the dominance of investment discourse in negotiating ECEC policy reform. As Moss (2014) suggests, one may disrupt dominant representations of ECEC’s purpose by exploring different perspectives on children’s education. In the sections that follow, I conceptualize cases as groups of social actors to compare how policymakers, students, a teacher, and parents represent the purpose of pre–K and negotiate investment discourse.

Methods To explore how Minnesotan policymakers represent childhood through their use of investment discourse to rationalize ECEC reform, I conducted a Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) (Fairclough, 2003) of Minnesotan policy texts rationalizing public funding for ECEC. These texts include speeches from three Minnesotan governors, policy reports from public-private partnerships, state legislation, and mission statements from advocacy groups and non-governmental organizations. Fairclough (2003) holds that “language is an irreducible part of social life, dialectically interconnected with other elements of social life” (p. 2), and that “texts have social, political, cognitive, moral and material consequences and effects” (p. 14). While some degree of shared understanding is essential for communication, power is rooted in social actors’ ability to determine what gets recognized as “common ground” (Fairclough, 2003, p. 55). A dominant discourse conceals the assumptions and beliefs underlying it, which make certain representations of social problems logical and inevitable, while eliding alternatives (Moss, 2014). In this chapter, I foreground Minnesotan policymakers’ assumptions about childhood through their use of investment discourse. These assumptions include viewing children through a deficit lens while also responsibilizing them. Additionally, I identify the discursive mechanisms, including metaphor and collocation (i.e., words that routinely appear together), which policymakers use to reinforce these assumptions within ECEC policy texts. I also conducted participant observations for one month in a pre–K classroom (referred to by the pseudonym the Rainbow classroom) in the

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greater Minneapolis area. Twelve students participated in observations. Through observations, I sought to gain an understanding of a typical day in the class and to have opportunities to ask students about what they saw as important knowledge for me to understand about pre–K. I sought to develop rapport with students by playing, chatting during lunch, participating in curricular activities, helping them with tasks, such as getting ready to go outside or tidying up the classroom, and reading books. I also sat down for one-on-one conversations with eight pre–K students. Conversations were conducted at a table in the hallway outside of the students’ classroom. I invited students to draw their classroom and while they drew, I asked them questions about pre–K. I sought to explore students’ perspectives on pre–K in ways that would be inviting and accessible, while supporting comparison with adult participants’ views. Instead of asking students to reflect on the benefits of pre–K, as I did with adults, I asked the children about their priorities and what they saw as important to know about pre–K. I gave students pseudonyms based on colors, as many of them expressed a love of art. I later conducted one remote interview with the lead teacher in this classroom (referred to by the pseudonym Rose), and one-on-one interviews with two parents (Ruby and Hazel), who had pre–K students in the Rainbow classroom. Through these interviews, I explored adult participants’ experiences with pre– K, their goals for their students/child, their perspectives on pre–K’s purposes and potential benefits, and their negotiation of investment discourse. I began analyzing the narratives of students, the teacher, and parents by reading the full transcripts of our conversations. Next, I adopted open-coding to identify themes that emerged in the narratives and compared these themes with dominant representations of ECEC identified in policy texts and literature. I applied CNA, which combines Narrative Analysis (NA) and CDA in a reconciled framework, to explore how social actors “create their selves in constant social interactions at both personal and institutional levels, and how institutional discourses influence and are influenced by personal everyday narratives” (Souto-Manning, 2014, pp. 162–163). While NA examines the meaning people make of their lived experiences, CDA analyzes the use of language, often in authoritative texts, in positioning certain representations of the social world as powerful and suppressing others (Souto-Manning, 2014). Combining CDA and NA can support deeper, critical analysis of how people engage with dominant, institutional discourses when constructing narratives about their experiences (Souto-Manning, 2014).

Findings Policymakers’ Discursive Subjectification of Children In this section, I explore how Minnesota’s ECEC policymakers use metaphors to reinforce an assumption that children are personally responsible for securing their own and the state’s collective future success. Additionally,

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I examine how policymakers use collocation to represent pre–K students through a deficit lens, which reinforces the assumption that their future is precarious and they are in need of intervention. Responsibilizing Children through Metaphor Fairclough (2003) writes that discourses can be “differentiated by metaphor” (p.131). He further articulates how lexical metaphors are established when “words which generally represent one part of the world (are) extended to another” (p.131). In this section, I explore how Governors Pawlenty and Dayton, the Minnesota School Readiness Business Advisory Council, and the Minnesota Early Learning Foundation employ metaphor to privilege investment discourse in rationalizing ECEC. By examining how these policymakers use metaphors, I identify and interrogate the ideological assumptions, which underlie investment discourse. Fairclough (2003) defines nominalization as “a type of grammatical metaphor,” which “exclud(es) social agents in the representation of events” and “can also obfuscate agency and responsibility” (p. 220). Table 11.1 shows examples of how Minnesotan ECEC policymakers engage nominalization through the use of the term “start” as a noun as opposed to a verb, in rationalizing ECEC initiatives. By using the word “start” in the passages outlined above, ECEC becomes a race or competition for a productive future. For example, in his 2006 State of the State address, Governor Pawlenty explicitly refers to “the education race.” Within the race metaphor, children are rendered personally responsible for their future, as they are the ones engaging in the act of starting. Understanding education as a race means children are also competing with Table 11.1 Examples of Nominalization Pawlenty (2006)

Dayton (2017)

Minnesota Early Learning Foundation (2011) Minnesota School Readiness Business Advisory Council (2004)

Governor Pawlenty requests that the Minnesota Legislature pass his proposed ECEC initiatives “to help make sure our youngest get a better start in the education race” (p. 6). Governor Dayton claims that publicly funded pre–K means “more Minnesota children are getting the better starts they need today for their better tomorrows” (p. 7). They claim “half of Minnesota children start kindergarten behind, and too many never catch up (p. 15).” The Council explains how their planned ECEC initiatives, which are centered on access to ECEC for children perceived to be “at-risk,” “enabl(e) all Minnesota children to get a Winning Start on school, work and life” (p. 29).

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one another for their futures. The notion of access to ECEC providing children with a “better” or “winning” start emphasizes the neoliberal value of equal opportunity, which prioritizes supporting an individual’s human capital development and chances for success, with the understanding that they must ultimately take responsibility for their outcomes and welfare (Bundy, 2012). This approach to equality diverges from the more social justiceoriented goal of seeking equal outcomes (Bundy, 2012). This approach further obfuscates how children are not equally positioned in this so-called education race.

Rendering Children at a Deficit through Collocation In examining how ECEC was justified in Minnesotan policy texts, I identified how words synonymous with deficit were used to describe children in relation to their education. Reference to children and their education were collocated with words and phrases synonymous with deficit, including: unprepared, unprepared to succeed, disadvantaged, achievement gap, at-risk, at risk of failure, behind, not ready for kindergarten. Table 11.2 highlights examples of how policymakers articulate this deficit view by virtue of their repeated use of certain word pairs and phrases. Policymakers’ use of deficit-oriented language to represent children is often employed in tandem with their responsibilization. These “gaps” are Table 11.2 Examples of Collocation Close Gaps by 5 (2021)

Dayton (2016)

MELF (2011)

“Because of achievement gaps, Minnesota children suffer and don’t have an equal opportunity to pursue the American dream. That’s obviously a tragedy for those kids. But beyond those children, Minnesota’s economy also suffers because we don’t have the educated workforce we need to compete globally. Minnesota’s communities suffer because we have fewer citizens prepared to thrive and build up our communities. Our taxpayers suffer because high school dropouts tend to lead to high taxpayer costs associated with unemployment, social services, health care, law enforcement and prisons” (para. 5). “(U)nfortunately, more children from more Minnesota families start school without the education and socialization experiences most other children enjoy. They enter kindergarten or early elementary grades already behind, and they struggle to catch up” (p. 11). “Half of Minnesota kids arrive for kindergarten unprepared. Too many never catch up, and eventually drop out of school” (p. 1).

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not only attributed to risking children’s individual failure; they also become responsible for a collective social and economic failure. This burden and deficit frame is disproportionately placed on the backs of children who already experience economic and racial marginalization. Minnesota’s racial “achievement gap” in education is widely cited as among the worst in the nation. However, as Ladson-Billings (2006) argues, there is no real achievement gap and instead, the racial disparities in education are better understood as reflecting “an education debt” (p. 5), whereby children of color are under-served and marginalized by American institutions, including the public education system. While some policymaking organizations, such as Close Gaps by 5 (2021), acknowledge an “opportunity gap is at the root of achievement gaps” (para. 3), they do not state who is failing to provide the opportunity, which risks placing the blame on families and further perpetuating a deficit lens. Investment discourse ultimately risks reframing inequity as individual failure while ignoring, and even accentuating, pervasive, systemic barriers to educational equity (Brown, 2019).

Educator and Parent Negotiations of Investment Discourse My conversations with the Rainbow classroom teacher, Rose, and two parents with students in the classroom, Ruby and Hazel, deepened my understanding of how investment discourse is negotiated in ECEC practice. While all participants expressed some support for the economic argument for ECEC, they also critiqued aspects of this dominant discourse. I described the investment rationale to each participant and then asked for their thoughts on this policy discourse. I asked Hazel her view on the dominance of this frame and she responded: Um, that’s a great question… I guess I feel like even for kids where that might not happen, even for kids where…they still might struggle…or still might need public support in their adults years, pre–K is still very important for them. As I described the logic underlying investment discourse to Ruby and asked her insights, she initially showed strong support, stating: “Oh, absolutely, absolutely.” However, as I followed up and prompted for her potential critiques of this approach, she shared: “I don’t think universal preschool is going to…set us up to have a better, a better economy in the future, or anything, I just feel like…you’re more setting up these kids as individuals.” As Ruby talked about prioritizing the individual benefits of ECEC, she explained, “I feel like it should be looked at more like ‘hey, we are going to be affording these kids an opportunity to be who they want to be.’” Ruby also stated strong support for universal pre–K, contending: “I feel like it should be…a thing where everybody should be able to send their kid to a preschool without having to worry about how they’re going to pay for it, regardless of their income.”

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My conversation with Rose highlighted the complexities educators face in navigating the heightened expectations surrounding pre–K. I asked Rose to share her thoughts about policymakers framing ECEC as an investment and she responded: “Like I agree, like what I said about the connection to reading and needing less intervention in elementary years, uh, I believe it comes from early childhood.” However, Rose also shed light on the limitations of this argument, which are rooted in the current conditions of ECEC practice. Rose shared that policymakers “don’t want to pay early childhood teachers the same as other teachers,” and these conditions have worsened since the COVID-19 pandemic began as teachers are “paid hourly” and “everything is cut.” Rose navigated a challenging terrain, as she adopted a critical view of the heightened expectations for ECEC while also recognizing the need to prepare students to face these expectations. Rose highlighted how she used playbased activities to support students’ kindergarten-readiness skills, such as numeracy, fine-motor, and literacy, which they would be assessed on in kindergarten. Rose discussed how students “start reading basically in kindergarten,” and “they are doing so much writing in kindergarten and first grade.” She shared that the kindergarten teachers she works with “don’t like the curriculum that was given to them and um, they think it’s like a firstgrade level, what used to be first grade” and that they “were devastated, they don’t have time for dramatic play. Maybe it happens like once a week for 30 minutes or something like that.” Rose also described the effects of these heightened expectations in reinforcing education disparities, stating: “So the kids who didn’t go to preschool or have really low skills, they just get lost and um, they have to spend a lot of time finding tutoring for them or people who can really catch them up.” Rose critically reflected: “I think that kindergarten should still be kindergarten and have the kids play more.” When discussing her pedagogical goals, Rose explained how in recent years she shifted from “teaching just letters and numbers to really focusing on socialemotional skills,” including “kindness,” as she saw a need for this due to students’ difficulties interacting with one another.

Pre–K Students’ Insights and Priorities I now turn to initial findings from my observations and conversations with pre–K students regarding what matters to them in pre–K. Researchers using NSC as a framework “seek children’s unmediated voices and… pass those unmediated voices on to a wider audience” (Lee, 2001, p. 133). In the following section, I highlight and reflect on the insights that students shared with me in an effort to invite engagement with their views. I describe how students’ narratives reveal a different set of priorities regarding pre–K from those of policymakers, as they navigate being away from home, classroom rules and processes, new activities, and complex emotions and relationships. Through engaging students’ narratives, pre–K shifts from a race to a predetermined future to a real place inhabited by real children.

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Important Classroom Processes, Regulations, Places, and Activities In response to my questions about what is important to understand about pre–K, students highlighted classroom behaviors, processes, norms, and valued places and activities. For instance, Violet provided a helpful orientation to classroom routines by narrating the arrival of students at school, including where students placed their belongings and naming different activities students engaged in to support their fine and gross motor development: “First, we go to school; get off lunch bag and bottle; put folder; balance beam; hand wash; alligator, tracing, butterfly, bicycle, bear, rolling.” Violet then explained that “after the lunch we read a book, get a partner, get a nice place to sit and read.” Violet also shared phrases that Rose used to get students’ attention and to signal transitions, such as chanting, “macaroni cheese” to which the students responded, “everybody freeze.” Students also highlighted ways they regulated their behavior and bodies in line with school expectations. This included emphasizing rules intended to keep their bodies safe. For example: “Watch where you’re going, otherwise…blood, be calm, and…no hitting” (Jade), and “maybe no hitting, no pushing, no kicking because you don’t want anything to get hurt” (Coral), and “To be quiet and to be safe” (Indigo). Violet shared that during group time, students “raise hands to tell, like that” and demonstrated raising her hand. Additionally, students reflected on important and valued places in their classroom, and emphasized the activities associated with those places. These activities include going outside or to the gym, doing art, and participating in dramatic play. Lavender shared that she loves dramatic play because of the doll house, where “everybody fights over being the mom.” During our conversation, Olive exclaimed that Rose’s class is “SO much fun!” When I followed up on what is fun, she shared: “art and dramatic play.” Indigo expressed that it would be important for younger kids to know that “we play a lot” in pre–K and “that we do lots of projects.” Navigating Complex Feelings and Relationships Many students prioritized having space and strategies to express and navigate complex feelings. On my second day of observations in the Rainbow classroom, Lavender gave me an informal tour of the classroom and showed me the “safe space” where she went when she missed her mom. During interviews, six out of the eight students that I spoke with emphasized the importance of this “safe space”: a physical area for students to go if they feel sad or upset. Violet explained that the “safe space” is somewhere students can go “if you’re sad” and “if you’re stressed.” Indigo shared that the “safe space” is important because you can “do lots of calming strategies.” During my observations, I saw students use the “safe space,” including on Parent Day

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when Turquoise was having a difficult time after her parents left. She decided to forego group time to process her feelings in the “safe space.” Another classroom resource for exploring emotions that students valued was a book, which included pictures of each child’s family and details regarding how they navigate feelings, such as what makes them happy and what they do if they feel angry. On my first day observing the Rainbow classroom, I told students I was trying to learn about their pre– K, and a student swiftly recommended that I look at this book. One afternoon I was looking through the book with a student and a large group of students joined, all wanting me to read their page. They seemed to revel in sharing details about themselves. I perceived that the fact that the book was student-authored made them proud. During my time in the Rainbow classroom, I also observed students feeling sad about being away from home. The book offered a connection to their families when these emotions arose. Another area of important knowledge that students highlighted was the ways they interact with their peers. Students emphasized strategies to keep peers’ bodies safe and to negotiate access to toys, including sharing, turn taking, and trading. One student explained, “If someone needs a toy, they want a turn, get a timer, when the timer is done, kids get a turn.” Coral described how students should act towards one another, stating: “being nice, not pushing people, I know you have to be nice.” These students’ narratives provide a striking contrast to policymakers’ use of investment discourse, which abstracts children from their present lives by envisioning pre–K as a place where children’s futures are narrowly defined and delimited. The narratives about pre–K by the students in the Rainbow room largely remained focused on the present, as they shared details about how they navigate their relationships with one another, classroom norms, important places, and favorite activities. In addition to identifying students’ priorities, I noted what they omitted from their narratives. For instance, due to policymakers’ focus on school readiness and academic achievement, I anticipated that students would emphasize important knowledge and skills in pre–K. However, only two students mentioned academic content, which they shared as something that would be helpful for younger kids to know before beginning pre–K. In this regard, students’ perspectives on what is important in pre–K diverge from policymakers’ institutional discourses. Students seemed much more focused on strategies to deal with their relationships with other students and the complex emotions they experienced. Not only does the emphasis on school readiness underlying investment discourse diverge from students’ priorities, it also risks undermining their priorities. As my conversation with Rose highlights, the heightened expectations and demands administrators place on ECEC means a reduction in free-play time. This directly conflicts with the priorities of the pre–K students I spoke with, who often described dramatic play as one of their favorite activities.

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Discussion Drawing on the New Sociology of Childhood and my experience of conducting research with pre–K students, I argue that engaging children in comparative education research offers emancipatory possibilities. First, consulting children regarding pre–K challenges the deficit lens through which investment discourse casts them. NSC scholars contend that, alongside the ethical imperative to engage children in research regarding education policies, there is also an “epistemological” (Marshall, 2016, p. 59) rationale, as children have unique, valuable knowledge. I did not anticipate the insights that students shared, and yet they were essential to my understanding of their classroom. For instance, I was struck by the importance that almost all students I spoke with placed on their classroom’s “safe space.” Through foregrounding their present emotional needs and experiences, students destabilize the future-oriented, dehumanizing frame that investment discourse offers of children and their education as primarily instruments for future economic progress. When sharing insights from my conversations with students, I am often met with the response: “Cute!” This reaction reflects a common assumption that children are not considered knowledge producers and interpreters of their social worlds. My research challenges this assumption by highlighting how the students participating in this study enriched my understanding of their pre–K, and, in so doing, elevated children’s social status as knowledgeable actors (Marshall, 2016). I experienced this firsthand as I spoke with pre–K students and observed their classroom. I was struck by students’ attentiveness to the power relations that mediated their interactions with adults. For instance, during my conversation with Garnet, she pointed out, “you can’t be little like me.” Initially, students seemed hesitant about my attempts to seek their knowledge regarding pre–K, with one student stating, “but we’re just kids!” To demonstrate my interest in their perspectives, I reminded students that I was new to their space, that I was also a student, and that I was seeking their help to learn about pre–K. Many students overcame their initial hesitancy and were eager to orient me to their classroom by explaining their routines and pointing out important places and artifacts. However, Lavender expressed a deeper reservation regarding her role as a knowledge producer. During our conversation, she shared that art and centers were important places in the classroom and when I asked to learn more, she suggested I consult Rose. When I asked Lavender what younger kids should know before they start pre–K, she answered: “That the, the teachers tell the kids what to do.” I followed up by asking: “Do kids also have their own ideas of what to do?” And Lavender responded: “Yeah.” My conversation with Lavender provided an opportunity to demonstrate that I recognized her as a valuable knowledge producer. A second emancipatory possibility of consulting children regarding ECEC is resisting their responsibilization. Engaging with children’s perspectives

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reminds us that investment discourse is in fact speaking about four-yearolds. They are tasked with addressing society’s deepest inequities and safeguarding the nation’s future economic competitiveness through their labor in pre–K. I do not seek to reinforce the problematic notion that children are inherently vulnerable beings whose innocence should be protected by policymakers. Instead, I propose that engaging with students’ present emotional needs and priorities in pre–K invites us to question whether it should be normalized to burden children with overcoming society’s deepest challenges and inequities through their performance in pre–K.

Complementary Methodological Approaches in a Comparative Case Study Bartlett and Vavrus (2017) suggest that CDA offers a useful methodological approach for CCS research that adopts “a critical bent” (p. 81). I found it beneficial to combine CDA with CNA in this comparative case study: I applied CDA to interrogate how policymakers construct investment discourse and used CNA to explore how pre–K students, parents, and a pre–K teacher negotiate this discourse and offer their own perspectives regarding ECEC. I now reflect on how CNA complements CCS’s multi-scalar, critical approach to comparative education research. Bartlett and Vavrus (2017) advise that when applying CCS, it is useful to avoid an adherence to distinct levels, such as the local, national, and international. Instead, they recommend exploring “connections among actors and authoritative texts at different scales” (p. 74) to understand how policies are produced and negotiated. CNA is uniquely suited for this endeavor through its understanding of policy discourses and everyday narratives as entangled and imbricated. CNA provides a framework for examining how policy discourses mediate people’s narratives and, in turn, how everyday stories make their way into and shape dominant policy discourses (Souto-Manning, 2014). CNA opens the possibility to recognize how social actors involved in ECEC practice do not simply receive and respond to policy discourses, but also actively engage with and shape these discourses. For instance, Rose reflected on navigating pressure from parents to incorporate more academic content, such as literacy and numeracy. These expectations are connected to investment discourse and demonstrate how this discourse is not simply generated from the top down by policymakers. Instead, it can also be circulated by parents and woven into their expectations of ECEC. CNA also aligns with CCS’s critical approach by providing analytical tools to explore possibilities for disrupting dominant policy discourses. SoutoManning (2014) advises that, to understand the power of policy discourses, it is useful to analyze whether they are “recycled in stories everyday people tell” (p. 163). CNA invites participants to practice critical awareness regarding how institutional discourses, like investment discourse, show up in their narratives and to interrogate the space between these discourses and their

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own values and experiences (Souto-Manning, 2014). Souto-Manning (2014) cautions that, during this process, researchers should avoid imposing their own understanding of “critical” and instead, seek participants’ critical perspectives. While this recommendation guided much of my approach to engaging with participants, in one instance, I explicitly provided my own critical position. During my conversation with Ruby, I asked if she saw anything problematic about the investment frame for ECEC or if she was “on board.” She was hesitant and responded, “I want to say I’m on board but I feel like it’s a trick question.” I could tell she sensed I had my own reservations regarding investment discourse, and I felt it was best to make them explicit in the hopes this may open dialogue. I shared that I was concerned about the pressures investment discourse places on children and its propensity to overlook structural barriers to equality. It seemed that this disclosure afforded space for Ruby to share her reservations regarding investment discourse, which were different from mine. For example, when I followed up regarding her thoughts, she stated: “I feel like preschool is just one tiny step…into like much bigger issues,” and she further highlighted how the focus of ECEC should be on supporting students’ individual growth as opposed to building the future economy.

New Directions Future CCS research on ECEC policy and practice may find affordances by comparing additional social groups’ perspectives on and experiences with education policies and policy discourses. In the research discussed in this chapter, I engaged the horizontal and vertical axes of the CCS approach by exploring and comparing how different groups of social actors envision and experience pre–K. This cultivated opportunities to question the taken-forgranted assumptions underlying investment discourse and to engage priorities that envision ECEC beyond economic ends. The inclusion of pre–K students in this comparison has been particularly beneficial. As Marshall (2016) argues, education research and policy have a significant influence on children’s lives and on social constructions of childhood. Applying the CCS approach supported my aim to recognize children as social actors and knowledge producers, while attending to underlying power relations that mediate their experiences. Future directions for ECEC research using the CCS approach may benefit from further exploring how students’ narratives regarding pre–K are influenced by and differ from those of adults. Pursuant of this aim, it may be useful to ask students about why they come to pre–K, what they perceive to be important to their parents and educators, and how that may differ from their own priorities. Another critical inquiry method for future research is to invite students, parents, and educators to imagine their dream pre–K program. This may allow for richer comparison of the priorities regarding pre–K that exist both within and

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between these social groups. In future research, I also seek to elicit and explore students’ own inquiries about ECEC. Here, I am inspired by Eagleton’s (1990) argument that: Children make the best theorists, since they have not yet been educated into accepting our routine social practices as “natural,” and so insist on posing to those practices the most embarrassingly general and fundamental questions, regarding them with a wondering estrangement which we adults have long forgotten. (p. 34) Comparing students’ perspectives with those of policymakers transforms the rationale for pre–K from primarily an economic one to a much broader experience, where the full scope of children’s emotions, needs, and relationships are negotiated and nurtured. By presenting students’ perspectives on pre–K, I invite readers to consider whether a discourse focused on meeting future labor market demands and reinforcing a narrative of personal responsibility is equipped to address children’s present priorities and needs, and to dismantle structural barriers to justice.

Discussion Questions 1

2

3

Klapperich contrasts how Minnesota policymakers construct the purposes of early childhood education to how children themselves understand it. Which of her specific examples were the most compelling for you, and why? Klapperich argues that CDA and CNA can be used effectively together in educational policy research. Beyond the study of ECEC policy, what other examples can you provide of their integrated use in a CCS? In thinking about your current or future research using the CCS approach, how might you (a) use CDA and/or CNA; and (b) compare categories of social actors (such as policymakers, teachers, and children) along the vertical axis of your design?

Note 1 I use ECEC instead of ECE to emphasize the value of “care” in early childhood policy and practice (Moss, 2014).

References Bartlett, L., & Vavrus, F. (2017). Rethinking case study research: A comparative approach. Routledge. Brown, C. P. (2019). Introducing the text and examining the emergence, maintenance, and expansion of gaps, deficits, and risks through early childhood policy. In F.

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Nxumalo & C. P. Brown (Eds.), Disrupting and countering deficits in early childhood education (pp. 1–19). Routledge. Bundy, J. (2012). Rendering (gender) invisible: Early childhood education and care in Ontario as a biopolitical social investment apparatus. Discourse: Studies in the Cultural Politics of Education, 33(4), 591–605. Campbell-Barr, V. (2012). Early years education and the value for money folklore. European Early Childhood Education Research Journal, 20(3), 423–437. Close Gaps by 5. (2021, November 22). Close gaps now. http://closegapsby5.org/ work/closegapsnow. Dayton, M. (2016). State of the State Address (Transcript). https://www.leg.mn.gov/ docs/2016/other/160350.pdf. Dayton, M. (2017). State of the State Address (Transcript). https://www.leg.mn.gov/ docs/2017/other/170206.pdf. Dockett, S., & Perry, B. (2005). ‘You need to know how to play safe’: Children’s experiences of starting school. Contemporary Issues in Early Childhood, 6(1), 4–18. Dudley-Marling, C. (2019). Rejecting deficit view of children in poverty in favor of a philosophy of abundance. In F. Nxumalo & C. P. Brown (Eds.), Disrupting and countering deficits in early childhood education (pp. 53–66). Routledge. Eagleton, T. (1990). The significance of theory. Basil Blackwell. Einarsdottir, J. (2005). We can decide what to play! Children’s perception of quality in an Icelandic playschool. Early Education and Development, 16(4), 469–488. Esping-Andersen, G. (2002). A child-centered social investment strategy. In G. Esping-Andersen, D. Gaille, A. Hemerjick, & J. Myles (Eds.), Why we need a new welfare state (pp. 26–67). Oxford University Press. Fairclough, N. (2003). Analyzing discourse: Textual analysis for social research. Routledge. Heckman, J. J. (2011). The economics of inequality: The value of early childhood education. American Educator, 35(1), 31–47. Kašcˇ ák, O., & Pupala, B. (2013). Buttoning up the gold collar: The child in neo-liberal visions of early education and care. Human Affairs, 23(2), 319–337. Ladson-Billings, G. (2006). From the achievement gap to the education debt: Understanding achievement in U.S. schools. Educational Researcher, 35 (7), 3–12. Lee, N. (2001). Childhood and society: Growing up in an age of uncertainty. Open University Press. Levison, D., Maynes, M. J., & Vavrus, F. (Eds.). (2021). Children and youth as subjects, objects, agents: Innovative approaches to research across space and time. Palgrave Macmillan. Marshall, L. (2016). Lessons from the ‘new’ sociology of childhood: How might listening to children improve the planning of education for development? IDPR, 38 (1), 55–74. Matthews, S. H. (2007). A window on the ‘new’ sociology of childhood. Sociology Compass, 1(1), 322–334. Minnesota Early Learning Foundation. (2011). Early education reform blueprint. http://closegapsby5.org/files/pdf/MELF_Blueprint_October_2011.pdf. Minnesota School Readiness Business Advisory Council (2004). Winning Start: A Plan for Investing Wisely. http://closegapsby5.org/files/pdf/Ready_for_School.pdf. Moss, P. (2014). Transformative change and real utopias in early childhood education: A story of democracy, experimentation and potentiality. Routledge. Pawlenty, T. (2006). State of the State Address (Transcript). https://www.leg.mn.gov/ docs/2006/Other/060223.pdf.

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Pérez, M. S. (2019). Dismantling racialized discourses in early childhood education and care. In F. Nxumalo & C. P. Brown (Eds.), Disrupting and countering deficits in early childhood education (pp. 20–36). Routledge. Rolnick, A. J., & Grunewald, R. (2003). Early childhood development: Economic development with a high public return. The Region, 17(4), 6–12. Rose, N. (1999). Powers of freedom: Reframing political thought. Cambridge University Press. Souto-Manning, M. (2014). Critical narrative analysis: The interplay of critical discourse and narrative analyses. International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education, 27(2), 159–180. Tatlow-Golden M, O’Farrelly C, Booth, A., O’Rourke, C., & Doyle, O. (2016). ‘Look, I have my ears open’: Resilience and early school experiences among children in an economically deprived suburban area in Ireland. School Psychology International, 37(2), 104–120.

Notes on Contributors

Elizabeth Adelman is a researcher and practitioner working in the field of international development, forced migration, and education. Her research explores the intersection of global strategies, national policies, and local experiences as they relate to the provision of education to students in fragile and conflict-affected states. Her current work focuses on the experience of and supports for teachers working conflict settings and how they understand their role and responsibilities with regards to the refugee and displaced learners in their classrooms. Elizabeth has worked in settings across the globe and is forever in debt to the many teachers who have welcomed her into their classrooms to observe their herculean efforts as educators. Elizabeth earned her EdD in Education Policy, Leadership and Instructional Practice and her MA in International Education Policy from the Harvard Graduate School of Education. Lesley Bartlett is Professor of Comparative and International Education and Chair of the Department of Educational Policy Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Her research and teaching interests relate to language and culture, migration, and education. Together, she and her colleague Frances Vavrus developed the comparative case study approach, as discussed in Rethinking Case Study Research: A Comparative Approach (2017). Abigail J. Beneke is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Educational Policy Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. A scholar of educational policy and practice, she examines school discipline and its reform using critical, sociocultural theories and comparative case study methods. Tiago Bittencourt is an assistant professor in the Department of Education at Universidad San Francisco de Quito, Ecuador. He holds a Ph.D. in Comparative and International Education Development from the University of Minnesota. His research draws on ethnographic methods to examine the role of class culture in the perpetuation of social inequality through social institutions such as schools. With a regional focus in Latin America, his current project focuses on “elite education” and its critical role in the DOI: 10.4324/9781003216551-13

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formation and reproduction of social class privilege. His work can be found in academic journals such as Anthropology & Education Quarterly, Compare: A Journal of Comparative and International Education, and Globalisation, Societies and Education. Leanne Cameron is a teacher, teacher trainer, researcher, and education advisor with extensive experience across the United States, Europe, and East Africa. She undertook doctoral studies at the University of Bristol, England, and since completion, she has worked on research briefs for UNESCO, the Inter-agency Network for Education in Emergencies (INEE), the International Education Funders Group (IEFG), and a number of university-based projects. At present, she is employed at Education Development Trust as a Senior Consultant, advising on projects related to teachers and their work across sub-Saharan Africa. Alex Klapperich is a Ph.D. Candidate in Comparative and International Development Education in the Department of Organizational Leadership, Policy, and Development at the University of Minnesota. Alex holds a master’s degree in Human Rights from the London School of Economics and Political Science and a second Master’s in Early Childhood Studies from Ryerson University, Toronto. She is a recipient of the 2021–2022 Doctoral Dissertation Fellowship from the University of Minnesota. Her work seeks to demonstrate the benefits of consulting children regarding their schooling and to expand strategies for engaging young children in education policy research. Jingjing Lou received her Ph.D. from Indiana University at Bloomington, Indiana, in the field of international and comparative education studies. She is currently an Associate Professor of Education and Youth Studies at Beloit College in Wisconsin. She is also affiliated with the Asian Studies, Environmental Studies, and Critical Identities Studies programs at Beloit College. Jingjing has been doing research on migrant and rural youth’s education in China since 2005, and has also studied other topics such as privatization of higher education in Russia and China, Sino-Africa higher education exchange programs, and education for sustainable development. Her current research project examines the impact of rapid industrialization, urbanization, and internal migration on the lived experience and educational and professional aspirations of migrant and rural youth living in between the urban and the rural space in China. Helen Rose Miesner is a Research Associate for the Education Policy Initiative at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill. She holds a Ph.D. in Educational Policy Studies from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. A former elementary general and special education teacher, Rose’s research examines how socio-political contexts shape the practical enactment of

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special education policy and how policy confluence informs the everyday practices of pre-K–12 teachers. Olayinka Olagbegi-Adegbite recently completed her Ph.D. in the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s Department of Educational Policy Studies. Her dissertation employed a comparative case study approach to examine the ramifications of language policies on early grade reading pedagogies within multilingual classrooms in linguistically diverse settings of Lagos. Dr. Olayinka has experience living and researching in Nigeria, where she studies how language ideologies inform language policy practices in early grade multilingual settings. She is passionate about research in the areas of diversity, equity, and inclusion as they relate to educational opportunities for the underserved. Dr. Olayinka has held administrative, teaching, and project assistant positions with various units across the UW-Madison campus, and has a long track record of successfully working with first-generation underrepresented students from low-income backgrounds. She is currently the Outreach Coordinator in the African Studies Program at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Maurice Sikenyi is the Global Manager, Research, Monitoring and Evaluation (RM&E) at the San Francisco non-profit Room to Read. Previously, he has served in various roles supporting teaching and research in the fields of education and training, teacher education, youth development, higher education, and peacebuilding. Dr. Sikenyi holds a Bachelor of Education (B.Ed.) First Class Honors from the University of Nairobi, Kenya; a Graduate Certificate of Advanced Study in Language Teaching from Syracuse University, New York; a Master of Arts degree in Peace Studies from the University of Notre Dame, Indiana; and a Ph.D. in Comparative and International Development Education from the University of Minnesota-Twin Cities. He is a former Fulbright Fellow at Syracuse University and Matasa Fellow at the University of Sussex, U.K. He has experience in educational research and management with interest in intersections of education, armed conflict, and development. Elena Toukan holds a Ph.D. in Curriculum, Teaching and Learning, with a specialization in Comparative International and Development Education, from the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education (OISE) at the University of Toronto. Her research and teaching focus on the interplay between global education policy and local agency, as well as the acquisition, generation and mobilization of knowledge through education, particularly as it relates to community development. Dr. Toukan is currently positioned as a Research Specialist with the Futures of Education Initiative at UNESCO, and an instructor at OISE. Her publications have appeared in numerous journals, including Curriculum Inquiry; Compare; Journal of Peace Education; Education,

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Citizenship & Social Justice; Interchange; and the Canadian Journal of Development Studies. Frances Vavrus is Professor of Comparative and International Development Education at the University of Minnesota-Twin Cities and Associate Chair of the Department of Organizational Leadership, Policy, and Development. She serves on the Joint ILO/UNESCO Committee of Experts on the Application of the Recommendations concerning Teaching Personnel and conducts research on teaching and teacher professional development in sub-Saharan Africa. She has published three previous books and numerous articles with Lesley Bartlett on the comparative case study approach, and her most recent book is Schooling as Uncertainty: An Ethnographic Memoir in Comparative Education (2021). Bethany Wilinski is Assistant Professor of International Studies in Education at Michigan State University and is education sector lead for the Tanzania Partnership Program. She studies policy enactment in early childhood settings in the United States and Tanzania, where she has over a decade of experience teaching, developing curricula, and working with teachers. Dr. Wilinski’s scholarship, advocacy, and international development work is focused on improving young children’s early learning experiences by ensuring their teachers are well-supported. Her current work uses video-cued ethnographic methods to examine diverse stakeholders’ notions of “good quality” teaching in pre-primary classrooms. Dr. Wilinski’s research has been published in journals such as Anthropology & Education Quarterly, Teaching and Teacher Education, and Teachers College Record.

Index

5R Process: in Hillside Elementary 23–25, 24; steps in 24, 24–25; systemic injustices ignored in 24–25 Abramson, Corey 1 Adebule, Idiat 58 Adelman, Elizabeth 9; CCS approach by 47–48; discussion questions on 48; methodology of 37–38 Adetuyi, C. A. 56 Adeyemi, B. B. 58 administrators: on peacebuilding 68, 78; role of 108; state department of education on 107–8 Ajibade, Y. A. 58 Akinsowon, F. I. 56 Alcohol and Other Drugs (AODA) 29 Allan, G. 121–22, 128 Ansoms, A. 177 anti-bullying laws 20 AODA see Alcohol and Other Drugs ARROW framework: definition of 26, 26; implementation of 27; on-call team in 27; in Pine Ridge 23, 25–27, 26; Zones of Regulation in 25–26 artifacts 21, 23, 31 Association of Teachers of English in Rwanda (ATER) 13; Cameron positionality within 179–80; case of 168–69; COP in 171; data analysis on 173–76, 174, 175; data collection methods on 171–73; discussion questions on 182; global relationships with 168–69; levels in 168, 178–79; mindset change in 176–77; as multi-scalar institution 169; PD in 168, 171, 176; professionalism and discourse in 169–71; research within CCS approach on 178–81; USDOS supporting 169, 172; valued

professionalism in 176; as voluntary professional association 168 Ball, S. J. 84, 102, 173 Bartlett, L.: on axes 124; on CDA 198; on change 127–28; on constant comparison 89–90; on context 154; on policymaking 188–89; on site 77 Baxter, J. 85 Becker, H. S. 6 Bellah, R. N. 121 Beneke, Abigail 9; conceptual framework of 21; design and methods of 21–23; discussion questions on 31; findings of 23; pilot data collected by 30–31; site selection by 30–31 Bennett, Andrew 3–4 Bianchi, Gabe 28–29 Bittencourt, Tiago 10–11; conceptual framework of 88–89; discussion questions on 96; methods of 89–90; processual approach by 84–85, 96; on student aspirations 90–91 Bourdieu, P. 95, 97nn1–2 Braun, A. 102 British Council 169, 172 Bunnell, T. 83 Calarco, J. M. 95 Cameron, Leanne 13; on CCS approach 167; data analysis by 173–76, 174, 175; data collection methods of 171–73; as discourse carrier 173; discussion questions on 182; network map by 173–74, 174; new directions for 181–82; positionality within ATER of 179–80; research within CCS approach by 178–81 capital conversion 88, 93, 95, 97n2

Index CAR see Central African Republic CASEL see Collaborative for Academic, Social, and Emotional Learning case studies: casing of 6–7; categorizing of 3; class in 4; definition of 1, 8; as interpretivist 5; as process-oriented 5–8; as variance-oriented 3–5 Case Studies and Theory Development in the Social Sciences (George & Bennett) 3–4 CCS see comparative case studies CDA see Critical Discourse Analysis Cedar Grove Middle School 22; C-Grove framework in 23, 28, 28–30; criminalizing district policies on 29 Central African Republic (CAR) 11; cases, contexts, and methods in 123; change over cycles of crisis and hope in 126–27; conflict in 126; COVID-19 impacting 127; fieldwork in 117–18; participatory data collection and analysis in 123–24 C-Grove framework: academics included in 28, 28–29; in Cedar Grove 23, 28, 28–30; core values in 28, 28; restorative justice in 29 Chile 11; as “behind” 126; cases, contexts, and methods in 123; circular timeline in 125; community time in 128; contested points of origin in 125–26; fieldwork in 117–18; participatory data collection and analysis in 123–24; segregated educational system in 123 China 12; discussion questions on 147; exams in 138–39; longitudinal studies in 137–38; migrant population in 133–34; neoliberal shift in 146; social stratification in 136, 145–46; urban schools in 137, 141–43; see also migrant children; new curriculum; rural education; suzhi; suzhi education; urban-rural dualism Close Gaps by 5 192, 193 CNA see Critical Narrative Analysis Collaborative for Academic, Social, and Emotional Learning (CASEL) 18 communities of practice (COP) 171–72 community: definition of 123; development, time, and change in 118–22; dimensions of 122; as protagonist 122; school in 127, 129 community agency 122, 128–29 community mapping 124

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community memory 117, 128 community time 121–22, 128 comparative case studies (CCS) 1; Adelman on 47–48; axes in 8, 11, 124; Cameron on 167, 178–81; categories of 2–3; challenges in 8–9; complementary methodological approaches in 198–99; emergent design in 6–7; on higher education and peacebuilding 77–78; implications for 128–29; interpretivist focus in 8; on language policy 61–62; on Lebanese teachers 47–48; Lou on 146–47; Miesner on 112–14; new theoretical directions generated by 127–29; on Nigeria 61–62; opportunities and challenges of 77–78; overview of 8–14; on PCS 77–78; process orientation in 6; processual approach in 8; on refugees 47; scope in 7; sequencing in 7–8; Sikenyi on 77–78; on suzhi 146–47; on suzhi education 146–47; on Syrian refugee teachers 47–48; Toukan on 128–29; see also transversal axis comparison 1–2; constant 89–90; controlled 4; data collection in 113; interpretivist case studies resisting 5; interpretivist focus in 8; relational approach to 10–11, 90; in transversal axis 130 conflict: student-teacher relationships in 36–37; transformation of 70; see also fragile and conflict-affected situations (FCAS) COP see communities of practice Correa, Rafael 84; Compromiso Presidencial No. 17270 by 87; Constitution proposed by 86; education reform under 85–88; LOEI by 86–87; on pelucones 87–88; on redistribution and class belligerence 87–88 COVID-19 pandemic 11; CAR impacted by 127; context of 103–4; discussion questions on 114; FAPE during 100; federal government on 106–7; methods impacted by 104–6; OSEP on 107; schools in 110–12; state department of education on 107–9 Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) 189–90, 200 Critical Narrative Analysis (CNA) 187; discussion questions on 200; NA and CDA in 190; scales in 198

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Index

Crow, G. P. 121, 122, 128 culture of poverty 91 data analysis: on ATER 173–76, 174, 175; as participatory 123–24; by Wilinski 157 Dayton, M. 191, 191, 192 DeJaeghere, Joan 180 Demerath, P. 92 de Souza Santos, Boaventura 117, 122 development 126 Developmental Designs 18 differential asset conversion 88, 97n1 discipline 9 discipline reform: conceptual framework in 21; criminalizing approaches in 20; design and methods on 21–23; discussion questions on 31; findings in 23; politics of 18–20; restorative justice in 20; SEL in 17–18; therapeutic approaches in 18–20; see also schools; Shady Glen School District discourse studies: discourse carrier in 173; teacher professionalism and 169–71; see also Critical Discourse Analysis; investment discourse Dupuy, K. 69 Dweck, Carol 177, 179 Eagleton, T. 200 early childhood education (ECE): language policies influencing 51; play-based learning in 152–53; quality in 150–52; second language learners in 61; see also Tanzania pre-primary education early childhood education and care (ECEC) 13, 200n1; children at deficit through collocation in 192, 192–93; children’s perspectives on 188; classroom processes, regulations, places, and activities in 195; CNA in 198; discussion questions on 200; educator and parent negotiations of investment discourse in 193–94; individual benefits of 193; investment discourse on 186–87; kindergarten in 194; literature on 187–88; navigating complex feelings and relationships in 195–96; new directions for 199–200; policy reform in 188; as race 191–92; responsibilization in 188, 197–98; students’ insights and priorities in 194–96; teachers paid less for 194

early grade reading pedagogy 51, 55 ECE see early childhood education ECEC see early childhood education and care Ecuador 10–11; discussion questions on 96; education reform under Correa in 85–88; financial crisis in 85; IB criticized in 84, 87; IB introduced to 83–84; plurinationalism in 86; private and public schools in 89, 91; redistribution and class belligerence in 87–88; redistribution in 86; scholarship programs in 88; student aspirations and daily practices of schooling in 93–95; student aspirations as collaborative accomplishment in 92–93; student aspirations as individual accomplishment in 90–91; see also St. Augustine; Unidad Educativa Carlos Tobar educational policy 7, 170 Education for All Handicapped Children Act (EHA) 101; see also Individuals with Disabilities in Education Improvement Act education quality 12–13 EHA see Education for All Handicapped Children Act Elliott, J. 151 ELT see English language teaching emergent design: in CCS approach 6–7; definition of 7; interpretivist case studies lacking 5 English language teacher associations 13 English language teaching (ELT) 168 Epistemologies of the South (de Souza Santos) 117 Evans, L. 169 Fairclough, N. 189, 191 FAPE see free appropriate public education FCAS see fragile and conflict-affected situations Firglade School District 103; FAPE in 109–10; schools in 104, 105, 110–12, 114n1 Foucault, M. 170, 181 fragile and conflict-affected situations (FCAS) 35; student-teacher relationships in 36–37; teacher objectives in 36; teachers in 34, 36; teaching processes in 37

Index free appropriate public education (FAPE) 11; context in 103–4; definition of 101; discussion questions on 114; federal government on 106–7; findings on 106; general education curriculum in 108–9, 110–11; literature on 101–2; methods in 104–6, 105; policy in 112–13; scales in 100–101; schools in 110–12; state department of education on 107–9 George, Alexander 3–4 Gerring, John 1 Glaeser, E. 69 global hierarchies 119 The Global Transformation of Time (Ogle) 120 Gong, Neil 1 Gorski, P. 91 Graham, Matthew 29 HDI see Human Development Index HEI see higher education institutions Heyneman, S. 69 higher education and peacebuilding: CCS approach on 77–78; contextual legitimacy in 72–75; discussion questions on 79; educational reconstruction in 69; homogeneous view in 76; literature review of 68–70; non-discriminatory access in 69; PCS curriculum in 72–77; pedagogy in 69–70; research design and methodology on 70–72; student practical activities in 75–76; theoretical and conceptual framework in 70; universal peacebuilding frameworks in 74 higher education institutions (HEI): democracy and 69; PCS programs in 67–68; peacebuilding policies established for 67–68 Hillside Elementary School 22; 5R Process in 23–25, 24; Lion’s Pride Leadership Team at 23–24; systemic injustices ignored by 24–25, 27 homologous horizontal comparison 22 “How many cases do I need?” (Small) 7 Human Development Index (HDI) 123 humanitarian work 126 IATEFL see International Association of Teachers of English as a Foreign Language

221

IB see International Baccalaureate IDEIA see Individuals with Disabilities in Education Improvement Act IEP see Individualized Educational Program Igboanusi, H. 51, 55, 61 imperialism 53, 59–60 inclusion 36 Individualized Educational Program (IEP) 100–101 Individuals with Disabilities in Education Improvement Act (IDEIA) 100, 102 International Association of Teachers of English as a Foreign Language (IATEFL) 169, 172 International Baccalaureate (IB) 10; discussion questions on 96; history of 83; introduced into Ecuador 83–84; redistribution, class belligerence and 87–88; student motivation for 90–91; unintended consequences of 95 investment discourse: deficit frame of 187; on ECEC 186–87; ECEC altered by 187, 196; educator and parent negotiations of 193–94 Jacka, T. 136 Jordaan, Y. 69 Junemann, C. 173 Kagame, Paul 177 Kenway, J. 93 Kenya 10; cattle rustling in 75–76; colonial influence on 73; education and violence in 69; language policy implementation in 58–59; PCS curriculum in 72–77; PCS programs in 67–68; peace policy established in 67; Sector-Wide Peace Education Policy in 72; universities in 68, 71, 79n1; violence in 67, 70; see also higher education Klapperich, Alex 13; CDA used by 198; CNA used by 190, 198; complementary methodological approaches of 198–99; discussion questions on 200; methods of 189–90; research design of 188–89 Ladson-Billings, G. 193 language ideologies 52–53 language of the immediate community (LIC) 55 language policy 9, 51; CCS approach on 61–62; colonial influence on 52, 59; cultural preservation in 57–58;

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discussion questions on 63; equivocation in 56–57, 61; language ideologies and social inequality in 52–53; Nigerian National Language Policy and Lagos State Language Policy as 54–58; teachers’ awareness and implementation of 58–61 Lazarus, M. 93 Lebanese teachers 9; academic obligations for 38; adapting learning goals and approaches of 38–39; CCS approach on 47–48; challenges of integration addressed by 42–43; discussion questions on 48; emotional obligations of 44–45; emotional support in academic settings by 46; goals of 34–35; identity developed by 45; institutional support lacking for 39; social obligations of 42; struggling students supported by 40–41; tolerance promoted by 43–44 Lebanon 9; non-formal schools in 36–38, 47; public schools in 35, 37–38, 45; racism and discrimination in 43; refugees lacking recognition in 42; Syrian refugees entering 35; see also Syrian refugee teachers Lee, Ching Kwan 4–5 Ley Orgánica de Educacíon Intercultural (LOEI) 86–87 LIC see language of the immediate community Lind, A. 87 local knowledge: in interpretivist case studies 5; in peace knowledge 76–77 LOEI see Ley Orgánica de Educacíon Intercultural Lou, Jingjing 12; on CCS approach 146–47; discussion questions on 147; longitudinal studies by 137–38 Maguire, M. 102 Maxwell, Joseph 3, 6, 10 Mbembe, Achille 120–21 Measuring Early Learning Quality and Outcomes (MELQO) 150–51; discussion questions on 163; on play-based learning 152–53, 161; rating scale in 153; on teaching that enhances learning 152–53, 161; on video clips 155; see also early childhood education; quality education MELF see Minnesota Early Learning Foundation

Merriam, S. B. 89 metaphor 191, 191–92 Metcalfe, A. S. 178 methodologies: of Adelman 37–38; definition of 178; experience in 181; on higher education and peacebuilding 70–72; of Klapperich 198–99; of Sikenyi 70–72; of Wilinski 152–57, 161–63 Miesner, Rose 11; CCS discussion by 112–14; on data collection 113–14; discussion questions on 114; methods by 104–6, 105; study context by 103–4 Mignolo, W. D. 87 migrant children: abilities and teachers for 142–44; in China 133; hukou affecting 133–34; literature on 134; suzhi beyond urban-rural dualism for 141–42; suzhi education deconstructed and redefined for 140–44; tuozhan nengli lacking for 142–43 mindfulness practices 19 Mindset (Dweck) 177, 179 mindset change: in ATER 176–77; limits of 178; Mindset on 177; Rwanda needing 177 Minnesota 13; CDA on 189; children at deficit through collocation in 192, 192–93; discussion questions on 200; ECEC debates in 186–87; educator and parent negotiations of investment discourse in 193–94; investment discourse used in 189; methods in 189–90; nominalization in 191, 191; policymakers’ discursive subjectification of children in 190–91; racial achievement gap in 193; responsibilizing children through metaphor in 191, 191–92; students’ insights and priorities in 194–96 Minnesota Early Learning Foundation (MELF) 191, 191, 192 Minnesota School Readiness Business Advisory Council 191, 191 monolingual community: as equivocation 56–57, 61; NPE on 55–56 Moss, P. 187, 189 movements 119, 131n1 Narrative Analysis (NA) 190 National Policy on Education (NPE) 51; equivocation in 56–57, 61; on language of immediate environment

Index 55–56; on monolingual communities 55–56 neoliberalism 13; education reforms in 102; equal opportunity in 192; in Kenyan universities 71; responsibilization in 177–78; suzhi in 144, 146 network mapping 174, 175, 176; coding in 175, 181; flattening in 175; as imperfect 181; iterations in 174; purpose of 173 new curriculum 135–36, 147n2; educators’ response to 138–39; suzhi education, rural children and 138–40 New Sociology of Childhood (NSC) 13, 187–88 Nigeria 10; awareness and implementation of language policies in 58–61; CCS approach on 61–62; English language in 53, 55–57, 59–61; equivocation used by 56–57, 61; languages in 54–55; LIC in 55–56; monolingual communities in 55–56; National Language Policy and Lagos State Language Policy in 54–58; research methods on 53–54; state-specific language policies in 57–59; Yoruba attire in 60; Yoruba language in 51–52, 57–60; see also National Policy on Education nominalization 191, 191 non-formal education 36–38, 47 nonviolent crisis intervention 19 NPE see National Policy on Education NSC see New Sociology of Childhood OECD see Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development Office of Special Education Programs (OSEP) 100, 107 Ogle, Vanessa 120 Ogunyemi, Lanre 58 Olagbaju, O. O. 56 Olagbegi-Adegbite, Olayinka 10; discussion questions on 63; research methods of 53–54 opportunity gap 13 Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) 123 OSEP see Office of Special Education Programs Palmer, Angie 25 Pawlenty, T. 191, 191 PBIS see positive behavioral interventions support

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PCS see peace and conflict studies PD see professional development peace and conflict studies (PCS) 10; CCS approach on 77–78; curriculum in 72–77; discussion questions on 79; in Kenyan higher education 67–68, 78–79 peacebuilding: administrators on 68, 78; educational reconstruction for 69; higher education, literature and 68–70; in Sub-Saharan Africa 67; see also higher education and peacebuilding peace education 10; faculty in 70; policy developed for 67 peace knowledge 10; definition of 70; local knowledge in 76–77 pelucones 87–88 Persell, C. 88 Philp, M. 170 photovoice method 137 Pine Ridge Elementary School 22; ARROW framework in 23, 25–27, 26; PBIS at 26 Piper, B. 53, 59 play-based learning: dramatic play in 187, 194–96; MELQO on 152–53, 157–58, 161 plurinationalism 86 policy: deficit view in 192, 192–93; for discipline 9; enactment in 102; in FAPE 11, 112–13; as nuanced process 102; practice and 160–61; progression of 21; see also artifacts; discipline reform; language policy policy equivocation 56–57, 61 positive behavioral interventions support (PBIS) 17; in therapeutic discipline reforms 18–19; tiers in 19 PPE see pre-primary education pre-kindergarten 13; children consulted about 197; classroom processes, regulations, places, and activities in 195; dramatic play in 187, 194–96; methods on 189–90; navigating complex feelings and relationships in 195–96; new directions for 199–200; policymakers’ discursive subjectification of children in 190–91; responsibilizing children through metaphor in 191, 191–92; “safe space” in 195–97; students’ insights and priorities in 194–96; see also early childhood education and care pre-primary education (PPE) 12, 152–53

224

Index

processual approach: by Bittencourt 84–85, 96; in CCS 8; on context 152; decisions in 96; definition of 6, 10; Maxwell on 6, 10 professional development (PD) 168, 171, 176 quality education 13; divergent perspectives on 160–61; in ECE 150–51; MELQO on 152–53; play-based learning in 152–53, 157–58; policymakers on 157–58, 160; university faculty on 158–60 Ragin, Charles 1 refugees 9, 47; see also Syrian refugee students; Syrian refugee teachers responsibilization: of children through metaphor 191, 191–92; definition of 188; in ECEC 188, 197–98; in neoliberalism 177–78 Responsive Classroom 18 restorative justice: in C-Grove framework 29; definition of 20; in Wisconsin schools 30 Roberts, Margaret 26 Robertson, S. L. 178 Rose, G. 173 Rose, N. 188 Rostow, W. W. 118 rural education 12, 133; educators’ response to new curriculum in 138–39; literature on 134; new curriculum, suzhi education, and rural children in 138–40; new curriculum in 135; schools in 137, 139, 147n3; students’ struggles with suzhi and suzhi education in 139–40; suzhi education deconstructed and redefined in 140–44 Rwanda 13; mindset change needed in 177; top-down national policy in 168; see also Association of Teachers of English in Rwanda scales 2, 8; in CNA 198; context in 103; discussion questions on 182; in FAPE 100–101; IDEIA informed by 100 schools: in community 127, 129; IDEIA in 100; policymaking in 21; special education and 110–12; see also discipline reform Schweisfurth, M. 151 SDG see Sustainable Development Goals

Second Step 18 Sector-Wide Peace Education Policy 72 SEL see social-emotional learning Semali, L. M. 57 Shady Glen School District: discipline reform in 17–18; findings on 23, 29; PBIS in 17; profile of 22, 31n1; racially disproportionate discipline in 29–30; SEL used by 18; see also Cedar Grove Middle School; Hillside Elementary School; Pine Ridge Elementary School Shohamy, E. G. 52 Sikenyi, Maurice 10; CCS approach by 77–78; discussion questions on 79; research design and methodology of 70–72 Simmons, Erica 4, 8 Small, Mario Luis 7 Smith, Linda Tuhiwai 121, 126 Smith, Nicholas 4, 8 Sobe, N. 90 social class 10 social-emotional learning (SEL) 17; definition of 19; programs in 18; Second Step curriculum for 18; in therapeutic discipline reforms 18–20 sociocultural policy analysis 21 Soss, Joe 6–7 Sousanis, Nick 181 Southern Regional Advocacy Center 25 Souto-Manning, M. 198–99 special education: context of 103–4; discussion questions on 114; federal government on 106–7; findings on 106; IDEIA on 100, 102; literature on 101–2; methods in 104–6, 105; schools in 110–12; sociopolitical factors influencing 101–2; state department of education on 107–9; teachers of 110; see also free appropriate public education (FAPE) special education teachers 110 Stake, Robert 5 St. Augustine 89, 97n3; academic concessions in 94–95; care in 96; counseling services at 91; hypercredentialing in 92–93; impression management in 92; student aspirations and daily practices of schooling in 93–95; student aspirations as collaborative accomplishment in 92–93

Index Stevens, M. L. 92 student aspirations: as collaborative accomplishment 92–93; daily practices of schooling and 93–95; as individual accomplishment 90–91 Sub-Saharan Africa: colonial influence in 52–53; English language in 53; language policies in 51–52; peacebuilding in 67, 70; see also Nigeria Sustainable Development Goals (SDG) 12, 151 suzhi 12, 134; CCS approach on 146–47; definition of 135, 137; discussion questions on 147; domains of 144–45; in neoliberalism 144, 146; students’ struggles with 139–40; suzhi education, rural-urban divide, and 135–37; types of 143–44; beyond urban-rural dualism 141–42; value coding in 136 suzhi education: abilities and teachers in 142–44; CCS approach on 146–47; deconstructed and redefined for rural and migrant children 140–44; definition of 135, 137; educators’ response to new curriculum in 138–39; as integrated 144; longitudinal studies in 137–38; new curriculum, rural children and 138–40; new curriculum in 135–36, 147n2; students’ struggles with 139–40; suzhi, rural-urban divide, and 135–37; tuozhan nengli in 142–43 Syrian refugee students: in Lebanese non-formal schools 36–38, 47; in Lebanese public schools 35; low expectations about 39 Syrian refugee teachers 9; academic obligations for 38; adapting learning goals and approaches of 39–40; CCS approach on 47–48; challenges of integration addressed by 43; discussion questions on 48; emotional obligations of 44–45; emotional support in academic settings by 46–47; goals of 34–35; identity developed by 45–46; social obligations of 42; struggling students supported by 41–42; tolerance promoted by 44 Tamayo, M. L. 85 Tanzania Institute of Education (TIE) 156, 156

225

Tanzania pre-primary education 12–13, 150; classroom profiles in 154; data generation on 155–57, 156, 156; discussion questions on 163; films created for 154–55; findings on 157–60; MELQO relevance in 153; multiple perspectives on 152; policy and practice for 160–61; policymaker perspectives on 158, 160; policymakers for 156, 156; short video clips on 155; Three Rs in 154; university faculty perspectives on 158–60; VCE in 153–54 teacher professionalism 13; definition of 169; discourse and 169–71; mindset change in 176; poverty impacting 178; power in 169–70; professional association in 170 teachers 9–10; academic obligations for 38; awareness and implementation of language policies by 58–61; in FAPE 11; in FCAS 34, 36; LIC and 56; obligations of 36; as policymakers 21; policymakers on 158; of refugees 36; student relationship with 36–37; training for 160; university faculty on 158–60; see also Lebanese teachers; Syrian refugee teachers teacher training colleges (TTCs) 156, 161 Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages (TESOL) International Association 169, 172, 173 Theodori, G. L. 123 TIE see Tanzania Institute of Education time: assumptions about 130; circular timeline in 125; colonialism influencing 120; development, change and 118–22; discussion questions on 130–31; interconnections in 120–21; as linear and unidirectional 118–19; as lived 121, 127, 131; standardization of 119–20; temporal language in 126; see also community time Tisdell, E. J. 89 Tobin, J. 153 Tom, A. 84, 96 Toukan, Elena 11–12; cases, contexts, and methods of 123; comparative analysis by 124–25; discussion questions on 130–31; on implications for CCS 128–29; participatory data collection and analysis by 123–24; research by 117–18; study, methods, and key findings of 122

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transferability 77–78 transversal axis 11–12; change over cycles of crisis and hope in 126–27; change over time in 127–28; in community development 117–18; comparison in 130; contested points of origin in 125–26; definition of 124; development, time, and change in 118–22; discussion questions on 130–31; embracing of 130; implications for 128–29; see also time trauma-informed care 19 Trudell, B. 53, 59 TTCs see teacher training colleges tuozhan nengli 142–43 Unidad Educativa Carlos Tobar (UECT) 89, 97nn3n4; academic concessions lacking in 93–94; counseling services lacking in 90–91; student aspirations and daily practices of schooling in 93–95; student aspirations as individual accomplishment in 90–91 unit 1 urban-rural dualism 12, 140; social stratification in 145; suzhi beyond 141–42 U.S. Department of State (USDOS): ATER supported by 169, 172; PD activities for 168 valued professionalism 176 variance-oriented approach 3 Vavrus, F.: on axes 124; on CDA 198; on change 127–28; on constant

comparison 89–90; on context 154; on policymaking 188–89; on site 77 video-cued ethnography (VCE) 12–13; challenges of 162–63; definition of 150, 153; discussion questions on 163–64; films created for 154–55; interviews in 155–57, 156, 156, 160; short video clips in 155; as useful tool 161–63; video as stimulus in 153–54; virtual conversation in 162 Walsh, C. E. 87 Wang, C. 137 Welcoming Schools 18 Wiese, M. 69 Wilinski, Bethany 12–13; background and conceptual framework of 150–52; data analysis by 157; data generation by 155–57, 156, 156; discussion questions on 163–64; document analysis by 152–53; films created by 154–55; methodological overview by 152–57; methodological reflections by 161–63; VCE by 153–54, 162 Wisconsin 9, 30; see also Shady Glen School District Wisler, A. K. 70, 76 World Bank 170, 180 Yan, H. 136 Yin, R. K. 8 Yoruba Language Preservation and Promotion Bill 57–58 Zones of Regulation 19, 25–26