A critical policy analysis of ‘Teach for Bangladesh’: a travelling policy touches down

ABSTRACT

This paper provides a critical policy analysis and network ethnography of Teach for Bangladesh (TfB). We demonstrate that TfB is a localised version of a global teacher education policy – Teach for All/America (TfAll/A). Santos, Boaventura De Sousa [2002. The Processes of Globalisation. Translated by Sheena Caldmell. Eurozine: Revista Crítica de Ciências Sociais and Eurozine, August, 1–48] has written about the ways some national policies travel globally. He calls these ‘globalised localisms’. When they touch down and are taken up in another national context, he calls this a ‘localised globalism’. We see TfB as a ‘localised globalism’. This paper is focused on documenting and analysing the policy network that has enabled a globalised localism, TfAll/A, to be taken up as a localised globalism in Bangladesh through TfB. We see this as the emergence of network governance in a developing world primary schooling context. The analysis shows how pivotal to TfB is the boundary spanning networking of its founder, who connects the global to the local, the private to the public, and the provision of social services to philanthropy.

KEYWORDS:

• Teach for Bangladesh
• network ethnography
• globalised localism and localised globalism
• network governance
• boundary spanner
• philanthropic governance

Notes on contributors

Rino Wiseman Adhikary is a PhD researcher at the University of Queensland, Australia. His area of research is globalisation and governance in education with specific focus on the activities of social entrepreneurs and new philanthropists.

Professor Bob Lingard is a Professorial Research Fellow in the School of Education at The University of Queensland, Australia. His most recent books include: Globalizing Educational Accountabilities (Routledge, 2016), co-authored with Wayne Martino, Goli Rezai-Rashti and Sam Sellar and the sole authored Politics, Policies and Pedagogies in Education (Routledge, 2014).

ORCID

Bob Lingard http://orcid.org/0000-0002-4101-9985

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Australian Government Research Training Program Scholarship and University of Queensland.