Research
You will find a complete range of our monographs, muti-authored and edited works including peer-reviewed, original scholarly research across the social sciences and aligned disciplines. We publish long and short form research and you can browse the complete Bristol University Press and Policy Press archive.
Policy Press also publishes policy reviews and polemic work which aim to challenge policy and practice in certain fields. These books have a practitioner in mind and are practical, accessible in style, as well as being academically sound and referenced.
Books: Research
Education is often heralded as a pathway towards success, prosperity, and overcoming the obstacles and inadequacies of the conditions children confront. However, hidden within this narrative lies the hegemonic Western development paradigm which so profoundly shapes the epistemological framework of the modern-day capitalist and globalized civilization. This homogenizing and globalizing paradigm impairs the ability to understand, value, and respect the alternative epistemologies of indigenous people and communities. This chapter draws attention to how the governing rationality of the Western paradigm has contributed to the denigration and disparagement of rural, peasant, and indigenous communities in Guatemala. It also analyses two concrete examples of educational resistance to the homogenizing impositions of official education in Guatemala. The chapter concludes that indigenous-led educational alternatives have the power to challenge the hegemony of Western educational norms and to create educational alternatives that respect, value, and esteem the specific, territorial epistemologies of place-based cultures.
This chapter addresses educational policies on gender in Puerto Rico, their background and development, and the discursive clashes arising from the global anti-gender crusade unleashed by religious fundamentalists and other conservative sectors that undermine national and regional political culture. First, I situate the discussion about the policies approved by the United Nations (UN) based on women’s human rights and the LGBTTQIA+ population. Next, I draw connections with neoliberal, national, and transnational policy trends, which have further harmed marginalized people and reduced the scope of democracy. The imposition of the PROMESA Law by the US Congress, which instituted the Fiscal Supervision Board to address the Puerto Rican government’s debt and whose measures particularly impact women and vulnerated groups, stands out amongst these harmful policies. Finally, as feminisms position themselves as the leading advocates for educational policies on gender, I conclude with a message of hope and possibility – a proposal for articulating transnational initiatives to advance agendas favouring educational policies on gender that broaden the realm of democracy.
Cuba has suffered from severe economic constraints since the demise of the Soviet Union in 1991 and, as a response, the government developed various economic policies that dealt largely with the opening of a market economy. The expansion of the tourism industry was one of them, and many teachers left the profession to seek opportunities, which has led to a chronic teacher shortage since the 1990s. By employing document analysis, this chapter outlines how the changes in its economic system impacted teacher policies in Cuba and discusses the results of these changes: lowering the entry bar, diversifying the supply chains, accepting teachers with few or no qualifications, and shifting responsibility towards remaining teachers by imposing extra work to make up for the insufficient number of teachers. These measures mimic the practices in countries in Central America and the Caribbean, which suggest dim prospects for Cuba. The chapter argues for the importance of revamping Cuba’s previous approach, which recruited and retained teachers through high professionalism; that is, through high social status, top salaries in the state system, and selective and rigorous training processes.
This book brings together researchers of – and research on – Central America and the Latin Caribbean (CALC) to explore the dynamics of global forces that challenge education systems in the region and to highlight the local efforts that seek to address, mitigate, and even counteract these forces. Examples of the global forces to which chapters in this volume are attentive include macro-economic pressures, geopolitical intervention, neocolonial relationships, global pandemics, international policy trends, the influence of international organizations, and transnational gang networks. While there exists literature on the global forces that have historically and generally affected CALC, and while some literature documents the challenges that face the education systems of this region, there are few publications that bring these two sets of issues into conversation. This is an important gap that warrants critical attention, for both sets of issues are intricately related.
This book addresses questions related to how education is contributing to maintaining and overcoming challenges and inequalities in the face of global and national pressures, and how national and local educational initiatives play out within the constraints imposed by their contexts. While the volume is oriented by an international political economy framework, each chapter presents recent empirical work that speaks directly to global-local dynamics.
This book brings together researchers of – and research on – Central America and the Latin Caribbean (CALC) to explore the dynamics of global forces that challenge education systems in the region and to highlight the local efforts that seek to address, mitigate, and even counteract these forces. Examples of the global forces to which chapters in this volume are attentive include macro-economic pressures, geopolitical intervention, neocolonial relationships, global pandemics, international policy trends, the influence of international organizations, and transnational gang networks. While there exists literature on the global forces that have historically and generally affected CALC, and while some literature documents the challenges that face the education systems of this region, there are few publications that bring these two sets of issues into conversation. This is an important gap that warrants critical attention, for both sets of issues are intricately related.
This book addresses questions related to how education is contributing to maintaining and overcoming challenges and inequalities in the face of global and national pressures, and how national and local educational initiatives play out within the constraints imposed by their contexts. While the volume is oriented by an international political economy framework, each chapter presents recent empirical work that speaks directly to global-local dynamics.
Policies and programmes on school convivencia (peaceful coexistence/positive school environment) have been broadly promoted in Latin America in recent decades, particularly in contexts of high levels of social violence, such as in El Salvador. In these settings, education is considered an essential instrument for strengthening peace and democracy. This chapter examines three unsuccessful attempts in El Salvador to achieve fundamental changes in interpersonal relationships in school convivencia. These attempts related to student participation in school governance, bullying, and sexual violence. Findings are derived from a comparative analysis of studies on each of these initiatives. An analytical framework centred on the interaction of ideas, actors, and institutions is used to examine the concept of convivencia, the role of actors at and across various levels of the education system, and the institutional strengths and weaknesses that affect the ability to formulate, implement, and evaluate these policies. The cross-case analysis demonstrates the complexity of addressing reforms focused on interpersonal relationships in schools that are, in turn, immersed in a broader cultural context. This chapter suggests the need to strengthen the role of multiple social actors, such as teachers, families, and local communities, in recognition of their power to enact or block a policy.
The global trend in governments’ responses to school closures due to the COVID-19 pandemic was to transition to online learning and provision of materials, which was also El Salvador’s response despite many students lacking access to the internet and adequate devices. Schooling was reduced to filling out worksheets, leading to ineffective learning that lacked meaning. This chapter presents, through primary data collected from teachers, parents, and students, an experience in rural El Salvador where a group of teachers dedicated themselves to ensuring that their students continued learning throughout the pandemic. Contrary to global curricular trends that prioritize improving reading speed over meaning, these teachers facilitated learning based on a sociocultural and communicative approach to literacy development. When government support arrived through centralized training, these teachers already had their own professional support community. This organizational capacity likely stemmed from their history during the Salvadoran Civil War and popular education practices developed in that period. This experience encourages governments, donors, and local organizations to: (1) promote literacy development rooted in meaning and socioemotional learning over reading speed; (2) change traditional centralized teacher training and turn towards learning communities; and (3) leverage the power of local history and relevant cultural factors for local solutions.
Historically, and despite their centrality to international political economy developments, Central America and the Latin Caribbean (CALC) have received insufficient attention from scholars. This is true both generally and when it comes to education research. This lack of attention is even more acute with regard to research that approaches education reform as nested within and contributing to larger (that is, national and international) political economic forces. As the introductory chapter to this volume, this chapter begins by addressing not only the scant attention that these regions have received but also their relevance more broadly. It then turns to characterizing the neglect of the CALC region in the available scholarship that understands education as located at the intersection of global-local and dialectical political-economic relationships. The chapter concludes by highlighting the contributions of the present volume to this gap in the literature.
This chapter concerns itself with three tasks: first, to depict some key historical and regional dynamics in Central America from a political economy perspective; second, to contextualize education reform in relation to international political-economic forces affecting the region; and, third, to outline the framework that informs the analysis and commentary presented in subsequent chapters. The purpose is not only to provide essential background context relevant to all the chapters in this volume, but also to make explicit the dimensions and tensions to which the chapters in this volume speak. In order to address the purposes set out earlier, the chapter first characterizes regional political-economic dynamics from a historical perspective from the 1800s to 1970. The chapter then turns to contextualizing education reform in relation to international political-economic forces affecting the region. This section is likewise historically and regionally focused. It attends to the pressures facing the education systems of Central America from the 1950s to the 1980s, the period in which education systems began to expand dramatically – and often with assistance from international organizations. The final section of the chapter pivots to present the framework – rooted in international political economy – that serves as the overarching analytic lens for the present volume.
Gangs have a strong presence in underprivileged neighbourhoods in Central America’s Northern Triangle. In El Salvador, their presence not only limits the sociability of ordinary youth but also affects the teaching and learning processes in public schools. This chapter looks at how government-sponsored programmes, following international models, aim to prevent violence and gang influence in public schools, and how the schools cope with educating gang-related students. To comprehend the relevance of these programmes for the challenges faced by local public schools, it examines the underlying concepts of prevention and their pertinence in the local context. It concludes that by employing a public security perspective that emphasizes individual decisions and responsibilities, these programmes typically disregard the social dynamics of the school, the families, and the nearby community. Although they can create the sensation that things are more or less under control, they can do little to prevent students from getting closer to gangs or to diminish gang influence in schools.
