Janet Soler

Roger Openshaw

This study addresses the critical issue of literacy crises around the world questioning their wider sociological and educational impact and demonstrating how literacy crises in one country can stimulate and shape literacy crises elsewhere.

Children Still Can't Read!

Literacy Crises and Reading Policies

Reading Across International Boundaries, edited by Roger Openshaw and Janet Soler, clearly demonstrates these broader characteristics of debates about the teaching of reading. It sets the educational issues firmly in the context of the social, cultural and political dynamics that inform and animate them and give them their meaning. It does so by setting out to understand their historical and comparative dimensions. Establishing the historical context highlights the origins and also the longevity of the problems and conflicts that are now widely familiar. The comparative approach also gives purchase on the wide range of approaches taken to these issues in nations around the world. More than this, however, this collection takes us into the realm of international influences. It underlines how debates in this area are not simply national, but are international and global in their scale. Moreover this is the case not only in relation to the broad fabric of policy debate, but also in the everyday struggles of pupils, parents and teachers in schools, classrooms and homes. Such an agenda is unsettling and provocative. It has the potential to challenge received opinion, to hustle preconceptions. It may also propose alternative visions for the improvement of teaching in this area that might be taken up and taken seriously in different localities or even more broadly. Most of all, it enables us to enrich and broaden our understanding of the learning and the teaching of reading at a time when awareness and vision are sorely needed. This collection of articles by leading scholars based in several different countries will be a significant contribution to the research field, but also a major resource when put to good use by policy makers and practitioners, as it should surely be.

History, Policy and Politics

Reading Across International Boundaries

Yoshiko Nozaki

Allan Luke

Disrupts popular myths about education in Asia and the Pacific. Struggles over Difference addresses education, schools, textbooks, and pedagogies in various countries of the Asia-Pacific, offering critical curriculum studies and policy analyses of national and regional educational systems. These systems face challenges linked to new economic formations, cultural globalization, and emergent regional and international geopolitical instabilities and conflicts. Contributors offer insights on how official knowledge, text, discourse, and discipline should be shaped; who should shape it; through which institutional agencies it should be administered; and social and cultural practices through which this should occur. The book disrupts popular myths about education in this part of the world, including base suppositions about the “other”: that Asian pedagogy is exclusively rote learning, that educational systems and governments here are faced with classical developing country issues, and that institutional and state formation in the region can be assessed on a North/West or left/right continuum. The essays not only map and reframe issues of difference for those who work in education in the Asia-Pacific, but also illuminate critical issues of curriculum and policy for teachers, students, teacher educators, and researchers worldwide. Yoshiko Nozaki is Assistant Professor of Educational Leadership and Policy at the University at Buffalo, State University of New York. Roger Openshaw has a Personal Chair in Education History at Massey University at Palmerston North in New Zealand. Allan Luke is Professor of Education at the Centre for Research in Pedagogy and Practice, National Institute of Education, Nanyang Technological University in Singapore.

Roger Openshaw

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