Changes in government policy and funding structures, alongside a rapidly evolving (international) market for education have made education provision a key revenue driver for UK higher education institutions. In this setting, the Russell Group of Universities (RGU), a self-selected association of elite, research-intensive universities and Business…

The public university in South Africa continues to propagate capitalist, competitive and neoliberal agendas that are inconsistent with agendas that could be considered to be of public good. These market-orientated logics and discourses have compromised teaching in the university because of increased casualisation of faculty as a result of cost…

Preamble: Singers gathering on stage. This is a paper for three voices. An attempt at a philosophic experience in the symphonic form. The first voice carries the tune and holds the shape of the paper as it focuses on Baudrillard and proposes that public education in Canada today is in fact a simulacra. The second voice has more room to roam,…

In the past decades, neoliberalism has permeated (foreign) language education, as has been discussed by critical research in the fields of: curriculum theory, applied linguistics, discourse analysis, language policy, language assessment, to name a few. Despite the fact that research on foreign language education and neoliberalism is certainly…

The article deals with changes in the area of education, especially at the higher level, after the so-called neoliberal turn of the 1980s. In order to explore the transformation of the sphere of education, the Marxian concept of commodification was used, as well as the four-level approach to the mechanisms of social reproduction of inequalities of…

This article deploys critical sociology to examine institutions of higher learning, worldwide, within a context of a more utopian set of possibilities. The article contests the idea of universities as marketplaces -- competition, commercialisation and vocationalisation; the synthetic values of docility, conformity, and image/impression management;…

The Information Systems discipline has long suffered an identity crisis. It has also been prone to program sustainability issues as a technology focus has waxed and waned over the last 50 years. This paper suggests a new approach to teaching Information Systems, utilizing the notion of "fundamental and powerful concepts." Using digital…

Reports of massive open online courses (MOOCs) appeared in mainstream news in the early 2010s with messages of potential disruption to existing higher education systems. Several years on, the role of MOOCs is still evolving. The media has the power to influence acceptance of new ideas, therefore this research investigates New Zealand news media…

"The Slow Professor: Challenging the Culture of Speed in the Academy" was published in 2016 to critical acclaim. Rejecting outright the marketisation of the modern university, the book proposed a countercultural approach which denounced the seductive imperatives to overwork and competition and called on academics to make a more…

Translanguaging and plurilingual approaches in English Language Education (ELE) have been important for envisaging more equitable language education. However, the languages implemented in translanguaging or plurilingual classrooms predominantly reflect the knowledge and belief systems of dominant, nation-state, "official", and/or…

This is the second of three articles on "Sources of Authority in Education". All use the work of Amy Gutmann as a heuristic device to describe and explain the prevalence of market-based models of Education Reform in the United States as part of what Pasi Sahlberg terms the Global Education Reform Movement (GERM). This movement is based…

Background: The shifting identity of a first-year class over a decade in terms of demography and representation, inevitably led me to reflect deeply on what I teach them and how I facilitate the learning process. I had to pay close attention to decolonisation and contextualisation. The basic research question is: How does one reflect on the…

Neoliberalism, the dominant ideology which covers almost all areas of life, has transformed education/ In Turkey as well as the whole world, and all aspects of education, including teacher training, have been faced with marketisation. Teacher education has started to aim to "train" teachers, and as a result , individuals who have gained…

The results of a 3-year fieldwork study within France's National Centre for Distance Education are presented, specifically detailing the impacts on higher education middle management overseeing curricula design for a series of French 3-year degree programs undergoing revision in how students are financially charged for the programs. Following the…

In response to the so-called crisis in contemporary education in the institutions of higher learning (USA)--the encroachment of corporatism and pervasion of standardization--there is a move to offset this dominance by reconceiving the university in terms of an intimate space of dwelling in learning and education. In light of this moribund…