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This chapter explores the colocation of ethnographic and discourse approaches in gender-focused research in comparative and international education. Drawing from the authors’ scholarship in the fields of girls’ education, women’s empowerment, and international education policy and development, this chapter highlights opportunities to interrogate culture in qualitative data through ethnographic and discourse approaches. The chapter concludes with reflection and future directions for these authors and for the field.

Antonio & Bonanno paint a fairly bleak picture of the trajectory of our current history in the emergent post-Cold War world. They show how three political discourses – Cold War modernization, neoliberal globalization, and neoconservative politics – all draw on particular elements of American Exceptionalism that have shifted us toward imperialist tendencies that “ignore or diminish the importance of substantive equality and social justice.” Although Langman & Burke stop short of making the same final point, their analysis of the weaker sides of the tri-part dialectic – individual/community, toughness/compassion, moralism/pragmatism – is useful in developing Antonio & Bonanno's point a bit further.

Introduces the notion of Distributed Competence and Performance Base Learning. Notes that cannot always learn for the future and asserts that DC ensures that people learn for the present. Provides examples of Distributed Competence Intervention and Performance Base Learning in practice.

In early April 2004, a group of social scientists gathered at Florida State University, for an interdisciplinary conference on “Globalization and the Sedimentation of the Cold War.”¹ The papers and discussions centered around the following question: Has the configuration of business–labor–government relations that took hold in the West after World War II – during the so-called “Cold War” – become “sedimented” in ways that delimit the possible scope of choices and actions decision-makers in key institutions and organizations can make and engage in. Has it done so in a manner that resembles an underlying program which remains concealed from sight – perhaps more so, as time goes by? If we should need to answer this question in the affirmative, this program would predetermine both the confines of strategies institutions and organizations can pursue in their efforts to confront emerging challenges, and the nature of the results those strategies produce. While the configuration, as it took shape in western democratic societies – especially in North America and Western Europe, but also in Japan – was historically specific, it produced a condition that appears to perpetuate patterns established during, and characteristic of, the Cold War – beyond the official end of the Cold War. By implication, decision-makers in politics, business, and the policy apparatus would presume the prevalence of patterns that were endemic to the Cold War constellation of business, labor, and government, along with corresponding definitions of the functions and responsibilities of government, as integral to the design of early twenty-first century societies. Put differently, in the absence of a definite break with the political and economic patterns that took hold during the Cold War, the latter will remain as a central feature and organizing principle, continuing to define the perimeter of choices we perceive, the nature of goals we pursue, and the types of means we both employ and deploy.

This chapter recounts my involvement with one of the World Bank's consultations soliciting critical input into the draft of its Education Strategy 2020. Following a summary of the consultation that took place at the Brookings Institution, I reflect on the Bank's response to the input it received as well as to subsequent iterations of its education strategy. This chapter suggests how education has been narrowly conceptualized by the World Bank in past lending policies and how the Bank now conceptualizes it with regard to its intrinsic or external value to human and societal well-being. To elaborate upon these opening points, it will be pointed out how the language and circulating discourses of the World Bank, as well as those of other major international policy and funding actors, reflect and limit the vision of what the goals and purposes of an education system should be. In short, this chapter suggests that the language and discourses of the new World Bank Education Strategy 2020 (like previous World Bank education strategies) are narrowly framed in market and commercial terms focused on improving the competitive position of a country in the global economy, which does not maximize human development.

One of the central themes of education for all (EFA) for the last two decades has been empowerment through access to education. The history of EFA, however, can at best be termed as checkered. EFA has been relatively successful in drawing world attention and improving access to education. However, the question whether world attention and improved access has resulted in empowerment of people in the developing world still remains unanswered.

In this paper we argue that the limited success of EFA can best be examined and analyzed by paying close attention to tension between demands of the global capital and labor market place and nationalist agendas of the developing (post-colonial) state. These tensions affect the EFA agenda in the developing countries in complex ways.

Taking empirical-educational data from Pakistan we demonstrate that demands of the global capital and the labor market had resulted in an increased attention on institutions and programs of study that cater to the needs of the global capital and labor pool. Access to these institutions is limited to certain strata of the society. On the other hand the mass education program in Pakistan is largely defined by the nationalistic agenda of the post-colonial undemocratic state. A net impact of the interplay of these global and national dynamics is that not only the EFA's aim of mass education is hampered but also more importantly education in its present state is not empowering the recipients.