Critical Texts on the Politics of Education

Course content

This course is an extended introduction to the controversial structural issues surrounding educational institutions and practices in society. By focusing on the major theoretical approaches that are useful in examining and re-considering the immanent regularities of the school as a dynamic organism, this course is organized around a couple of overlapping circles of analysis. One of the major circle will focus on the issues of ecology of education; examining the ways in which schools are embedded within social, historical, and cultural contexts, the recognition of pedagogical domain as a site of (re)producing the technologies of collaboration with the families and the communities in the circuits of reciprocity principle, and the role in producing or transforming the existing power relations in society. Another circle will offer critical engagement with intra-institutional centers , i.e. a complex set of authority patterns and governance structures, rituals, micro practices established around the students, administrators, and teachers, and foundations of morality. This course does not offer a continuous reflection on the contemporary issues of education, but inhabits instead back and forth encounters of micro and macro level of historically and culturally sedimented discourses of that root silently within these circles.