Teachers, students and parents all have different interests, perceptions and preoccupations. Reporting on research in very different geographical contexts, the seven contributions to this open issue cover a wide range of such stakeholders in education, including school principals and educational researchers in addition to the groups already mentioned. They highlight the diverging motivations, aspirations, anxieties and frustrations of these participants in the educational process and discuss a variety of theoretical perspectives on the constraints and opportunities that these participants encounter. What the papers have in common is their use of qualitative data collected through interviews, focus groups and participant observation to explore their research questions.
The paper by Kosunen and Carrasco compares Finland and Chile in the images that parents form about the reputation of schools when they need to select a school for their child. Parents seek to know the quality of schools and their social composition and link them to their hopes and fears concerning their child’s education. The authors draw on Bernstein’s instrumental and expressive orders to analyse these parental images and the subsequent school choice. The instrumental order refers to the market value of the education provided as measured by school achievement. The expressive social order concerns the social make-up of schools and how well the child would ‘fit in’. The expressive personal order relates to the child’s experience of school as a physically and mentally safe environment. While the expressive social order was seen as the most important factor informing images of school reputations in Chile, the expressive-personal order was more important in Finland.
Chan, Siu-Keung Ngai and Choi closely examine the career experiences of eight female primary school principals in Hong Kong to assess how different they are from those in English-speaking countries. They identify a range of facilitating conditions, including the expansion of promotion opportunities, strong values placed on education and training, professional encouragement, and support and help in relieving family responsibilities. While acknowledging the value of these factors, the authors also consider them to be incidental, informal, familial and individual, and to only contribute to a risk of burn-out and feelings of guilt and inadequacy in managing family responsibilities. The findings highlight the cultural and contextual specificities of Hong Kong and provide a nuanced understanding of Chinese patriarchy.
Interested in the growing international mobility of academic staff, Zha focuses on a small group of Chinese research chair holders working in Canada to assess what motivated them to pursue their careers abroad. He investigates a number of push and pull factors to shed light on their relative strength in explaining why these scholars settled in Canada. While push factors relate to adverse domestic circumstances, pull factors pertain to better personal and professional opportunities in the host country. The open and inclusive character of Canadian society and the mitigated competitive environment were mentioned as strong pull factors by his interview partners. Some, however, also felt that their academic achievements were not fully recognised because of the prevailing culture of egalitarianism.
In a distinct anthropological contribution, Milligan reflects on her own role as educational researcher carrying out fieldwork among final year secondary school students in a rural community in Western Kenya. She discusses the use of participative techniques as an enabling tool for an outsider to both gain insider perspectives and develop a more insider role in the community by privileging and legitimating participant-driven data. The concept of the ‘inbetweener’ researcher is introduced and this is contrasted with dichotomous notions of ‘insiderness’ and ‘outsiderness’. It is suggested that inbetweener researchers are better able to uncover participants’ authentic views and reduce a social desirability bias.
Using focus-group and semi-structured interview data, Floyd and Fuller explore the background, identities and experiences of a small group of Jamaican School Leaders who were involved in a leadership development programme. By drawing on the concepts of culture, socialisation and identity, they examine how the participants’ journeys of becoming and remaining school leaders are influenced by national and local level societal and cultural conditions, experienced at a local level. While recognising the constraining influence of factors such as violence and gang culture, school leaders nonetheless displayed a strong sense of agency in attempting to change the social structures within the institutions they lead and in the surrounding local communities. The Church and the Christian faith were often mentioned as sources of resilience and as powerful influences on their personal and professional identities.
Drawing on data collected in South Korea, Jordan and the USA, Collet and Bang examine the degree to which security concerns impact on the schooling of North Korean refugees in South Korea and Iraqi refugees in Jordan. The authors approach this topic through the lens of securitisation, which refers to a process involving the identification of existential threats to the dominant group, the belief that exceptional measures are required to protect the group and the conviction that the adoption of such measures justifies a break from normal democratic procedures. Their findings indicate that some North Korean students act upon the threats constructed around them by trying to blend in and to hide their identities. South Koreans’ perceptions of North Koreans’ poverty and unwillingness to work hard in a capitalist society contribute to a sense that North Koreans are a burden to society. In contrast, Iraqi refugees in Jordan are perceived as wealthy and skilled, fuelling the fear that they represent a source of competition for Jordan’s limited resources and public services.
The final article, written by Hammad, explores perceptions of a cohort of Egyptian teachers about their overseas training experience upon completion of a nine-month continuing professional development (CPD) programme in the UK. Data were mainly gathered through four focus-group interviews with a sample of 35 Egyptian teachers during the last week of their stay in England. Findings indicate that the CPD programme did not match teachers’ expectations. In particular, the teachers raised concerns about course content, lack of integration into university life and lack of opportunities for social interaction with other students leading to inadequate language development. The paper explores the clash of aspirations and locates them within a wider discourse of cultural dissonance. It concludes by noting that opposing expectations and values need to be exposed, discussed and reflected upon for CPD programmes to have positive outcomes.
We end by presenting a forum based on contributions to the BAICE Thematic Forum ‘Challenging deficit discourses in international education and development’, held in April–May 2015. Although not all contributors to the forum agree with the idea that deficit discourses are necessarily incompatible with empowering minority groups, they do share a concern about the ways in which policy discourses around deficit have led to the neglect of or misrepresentation of these groups.
Finally, we would like to express a word of gratitude to Sheila Aikman, Qing Gu and Yann Lebeau, who have made a valuable contribution to the editorial board for many years, and to Joseph Ghartey Ampiah, who has been an esteemed member of the international advisory board.