Session Information
32 SES 14, Quality Education & UN Sustainable Development Goal 4: Inter-Country Dialogues about Enactment
Symposium
Contribution
The United Nations (2015) Sustainable Development Goals, signed by developed and developing countries, place education as a central component in the global need for sustainability and attainment of well-being.
At one level the commitment to the UN goals is a matter of politics - at both national and global levels. The wording of the criteria represents internationally negotiated compromises, with resulting high level abstractions and emphasis on numerical quantification. However, governments’ endorsement of the goals can be held as a commitment to action, empowering organisational action, learning and change. For effective implementation educational organisations, at both macro and micro levels, need to unpack abstractions, examine local needs and conditions, and collaboratively develop specific and sequenced direct actions. Important questions are embedded in the apparently simply overarching statement: “Ensure inclusive and equitable quality education and promote lifelong learning opportunities for all”. Each word carries embedded assumptions and provokes critical investigation.
Sustainability itself is a multi-facetted concept. It encompasses concern about survival at both planetary and very local level. It considers preservation of life forms and habitats, and the preservation of not only human life but also its quality (for instance Adams, 2006; James, Magee, Scerri, & Steger, 2015; Kates, 2010; Al Amin & Greenwood, 2019). Sustainability also invites examination of whether organisational initiatives and practices have capacity for continuation. It is a future-focused concept and provokes scrutiny of what needs to be done to ensure well-being in the future. The UN SDGs address elimination of hunger and poverty, gender equity, environmental care, economic growth, peace and social justice as well as education. Education is, moreover, marked as a means of assisting the achievement of the other goals.
In many developing countries organisations in the education sector, from Ministry down to school level, may experience pressure to ‘tick boxes’ in order to satisfy governmental expectations of reportable positive outcomes. Questioning of the meanings of quality and effectiveness requires considerable unlearning and new learning: old patterns of practice need to be re-examined and perhaps disrupted; new relationships with consequent new ways of operating may need to be explored.
A number of emergent researchers in Bangladesh have been exploring the rhetoric of SDG4 policy discourse and the implications these discourses have for genuine improvements in educational practices in the various organisations (and wider fields) they are involved with. They have networked with other researchers from different countries (Australia, New Zealand, Nepal Afganistan, Malaysia, Vietnam, Jamaica) in order to widen their perspectives and to develop partnerships for critical analysis. This symposium reports –in the form of dialogues- the research activity of a number of these working partnerships. Each paper focuses on a particular field within education and on the implied learning for (a) particular organisation (s). Additionally, the symposium as a whole explores the concept of quality education in terms of recipients, agents and processes.
This symposium address the theme of a world of risks in several ways. The SDGs have been developed because of a global recognition of the risks to planetary sustainability. The educational organisations within developing countries seek to produce positive outcomes in social and economic contexts that are volatile, uncertain complex and ambiguous. A choice to question, re-learn and create change – at some level- is a risky undertaking, requiring courage and communicative engagement as well as vision.
Engagement in cross-national dialogues (Duffy, Hatton & Sallis, 2019) enables researchers in this symposium (each an active member of an educational organisation) to reach beyond dominant discourses of their own context and, through critical dialogic analysis, to re-consider local aspirations, blocks and possibilities as well as the wider extra-national forces that impact change.
References
Adams, W. M. (2006, January). The future of sustainability: Re-thinking environment and development in the twenty-first century. In Report of the IUCN renowned thinkers meeting (Vol. 29, p. 31). Al Amin, Md & Greenwood, J. (2019 in press). The UN Sustainable Development Goals and teacher development for effective English teaching in Bangladesh: A gap that needs bridging. Journal of Teacher Education for Sustainability. Duffy, P. Hatton, C. & Sallis, R.(2019). Drama research methods: Provocations of practice. Leiden, the Netherlands: Brill/Sense James, P., Magee, L., Scerri, A., & Steger, M. B. (2015). Urban sustainability in theory and practice: Circles of sustainability. London: Earthscan/Routledge. Kates, Robert W., ed. (2010, December). Readings in Sustainability Science and Technology – an introduction to the key literatures of sustainability science .CID Working Paper No. 213. Center for International Development, Harvard University. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University. Journal of Teacher Education for Sustainability. United Nations (2018). Achieving the Sustainable Development Goals in the Least Developed Countries: A Compendium of Policy Options. New York & Geneva: United Nations. United Nations. (2015). Resolution adopted by the General Assembly on 25 September 2015: Transforming our world: the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development A/RES/70/1. Retrieved from http://www.un.org/ga/search/view_doc.asp? symbol=A/RES/70/1&Lang=E
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