Contemporary globalisation is shifting the established spatial configuration of education organised through national education systems. The effects of this re-spatialisation are evident as travelling reforms, like lifelong learning, which flow around the world and fuel similar processes of education reform in different countries. Education researchers investigating these globalising trajectories tended to frame their research at the intersection of policy studies and comparative education (Steiner-Khamsi, 2012) and highlight the agency of states and policy makers in respatialising education. Yet non-state actors, like ‚educators, other professionals-who-educate and collective actors, such as occupations, also make educational boundaries, which define education spaces and their contents.
Our aim in this symposium is to theorise ‚educational boundary work’. We interrogate the forms of labour that construct boundaries and their effects in (a) defining the contents (including purposes) of established and emerging educational spaces and (b) constructing educational territories (governed spaces) that are occupied by actors who engage in ‚educational work’; those forms of labour that make, orient and enact spaces which yield learning.
This symposium builds on previous research and a transnational and transdisciplinary collection of case studies of educational boundary work (Seddon, Henriksson, Niemeyer 2009; Devos et. al forthcoming). We investigated the way teaching is being reconfigured in global-local work-related settings. What changes? What persists as an anchor-point for occupational identities and teacher agency? In particular, what kind of ‘educational work’ takes place in boundary zones, where different occupational identities engage with one another to contest and negotiate expertise and professional knowledge, work practices and cultures? Our cases provided insights in to reconfigurations, transformations, and changes in the organisation, governance and professional practices associated with education. They tell stories about educational activities extending beyond the boundaries of established institutions like schools or universities, stretching the occupational territories of educators and revealing a diversity of professionals-who-educate on in workplaces, community settings, social webs and supra- and sub-national networks that exist beyond established schooling.
In previous ECER conferences we have reported case studies of ‘disturbing work’ and the way they intersect occupational agency in transforming politics (ECER, 2009-10). This agenda focused our attention on the work of individual and collective actors – educators, professionals-who-educate and occupations – who make and remake educational spaces and their boundaries. We used these analyses to develop our analytical concept of ‘educational work’, which recognises that many professionals do educational work – be it as a teacher, a social worker, a human resource manager, a youth or childcare worker, a counsellor (ECER 2011).
At ECER 2012, we will test the concept of ‘educational boundary work’. Each paper identifies and uses specific conceptual resources and empirical cases involving specific actors to build theory about educational boundary work. They indicate the main theoretical concepts we are drawing on from our disciplinary and national backgrounds and the significance of space, time, subjectivity and power in boundary work. Together, they develop transnational knowledge about boundary work, which helps to capture and explain the extended importance of learning and the extension of educational contexts in a global knowledge society.