JNF Archives

Transdisciplinary Experiments

Transdisciplinary Experiments: Research, teaching and institutionalisation explores how experimental approaches can reshape research, education, and institutions in higher education to better respond to today’s complex and interconnected challenges. The book is grounded in the idea of ‘the experiment’ as a way to open up new possibilities, whether in knowledge-creation, teaching and learning, or institutional structures and initiatives. It examines how these experiments can inspire meaningful change across disciplines, sectors and cultures.

International contributors – scholars, artists, scientists, teachers, curators, community and academic leaders – offer diverse perspectives blending practical strategies with theoretical insights. These contributions advance the framing of transdisciplinarity and its implications for practice. The book engages with project-based teaching, flexible course and programme designs, and new forms of organisation. In doing so, it converges on a common goal of rethinking how we create and share knowledge in ways that are more collaborative and adaptive, and aligned with the needs of a rapidly changing world. A section titled ‘Provocations’ offers further reflections from four contributors on leadership challenges, failures and possibilities for creative interventions.

By connecting curiosity with action and experimentation with institutionalisation, Transdisciplinary Experiments offers a vision of what higher education research, teaching, learning and leadership can look like when driven by creativity, openness and a commitment to building more resilient futures.

Delhi’s Education Revolution

In 2015, the Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) was elected to govern Delhi promising to improve public services, including education through government schools that would be the equal of private-school provision. Media reports, along with the party’s re-election in 2020, suggest strong public confidence that AAP are delivering on that promise. But is this success reflected by experience in schools?

Delhi’s Education Revolution offers a critical evaluation of the AAP’s education reforms by exploring policy and practice through the eyes of one key group: the government-school teachers tasked with making the AAP’s pledge a reality. Drawing on 110 research interviews conducted via Zoom during the Covid pandemic in the summer of 2020, teachers explain how the reforms have changed their profession and practice, and whether education really has improved for children of all backgrounds. Analysis of views about critical issues such as inclusion and the pressure of achievement targets in classrooms that often contain more than 50 students, informs their observations about the reform programme itself. The study paints a more qualified picture of success than suggested elsewhere and makes a valuable contribution to the understanding of education reforms in India, and most especially, in Delhi.

Myanmar’s Education Reforms

This book reviews the state of education in Myanmar over the past decade and a half as the country is undergoing profound albeit incomplete transformation. Set within the context of Myanmar’s peace process and the wider reforms since 2012, Marie Lall’s analysis of education policy and practice serves as a case study on how the reform programme has evolved. Drawing on over 15 years of field research carried out across Myanmar, the book offers a cohesive inquiry into government and non-government education sectors, the reform process, and how the transition has played out across schools, universities and wider society. It casts scrutiny on changes in basic education, the alternative monastic education, higher education and teacher education, and engages with issues of ethnic education and the debate on the role of language and the local curriculum as part of the peace process. In so doing, it gives voice to those most affected by the changing landscape of Myanmar’s education and wider reform process: the students and parents of all ethnic backgrounds, teachers, teacher trainees and university staff that are rarely heard. Marie Lall argues that, despite a commitment to greater equality and equity expressed in the Ministry of Education’s policy documents, Myanmar has missed a historic opportunity to make use of education reform to engage with deep-seated social injustices. Inequalities persist in the long-term outcomes for poorer sections of society and between the majority Bamars and ethnic nationality communities. This is the portrait of a country constrained by internal tensions and competing international priorities that serve to divert the professed course towards social justice.

Praise for Myanmar’s Education Reforms
‘A cohesive inquiry into multiple reform processes of government and non-government education sectors and how this education reform played out across schools and universities around Myanmar.’
Sojourn: Journal of Social Issues in Southeast Asia

Transforming Early Childhood in England

Early childhood education and care has been a political priority in England since 1997, when government finally turned its attention to this long-neglected area. Public funding has increased, policy initiatives have proliferated and at each general election political parties aim to outbid each other in their offer to families. Transforming Early Childhood in England: Towards a Democratic Education argues that, despite this attention, the system of early childhood services remains flawed and dysfunctional. National discourse is dominated by the cost and availability of childcare at the expense of holistic education, while a hotchpotch of fragmented provision staffed by a devalued workforce struggles with a culture of targets and measurement. With such deep-rooted problems, early childhood education and care in England is beyond minor improvements. In the context of austerity measures affecting many young families, transformative change is urgent.

Transforming Early Childhood in England offers a critical analysis of the current system and proposes change based on young children’s universal right to education. The book calls for provision built on democratic principles, where all learning by all children is visible and recognised, educators are trusted and respected, and a calmer approach called ‘slow pedagogy’ replaces outcomes-driven targets. Combining criticism and hope, and drawing on inspiring research and examples from home and abroad, the book is essential reading for students, educators, practitioners, parents, academics and policymakers – anyone, in fact, who seeks to understand the policy problems for early childhood education and care in England, and see better prospects for the future.

Shaping Higher Education with Students

Forging closer links between university research and teaching has become an important way to enhance the quality of higher education across the world. As student engagement takes centre stage in academic life, how can academics and university leaders engage with their students to connect research and teaching more effectively? In this highly accessible book, the contributors show how students and academics can work in partnership to shape research-based education.

Featuring student perspectives, it offers academics and university leaders practical suggestions and inspiring ideas on higher education pedagogy, including principles of working with students as partners in higher education, connecting students with real-world outputs, transcending disciplinary boundaries in student research activities, connecting students with the workplace, and innovative assessment and teaching practices. Written and edited in full collaboration with students and leading educator-researchers from a wide spectrum of academic disciplines, this book poses fundamental questions about learning and learning communities in contemporary higher education.

The Research University in Today’s Society

In this topical lecture, investor and philanthropist Gerald Chan examines the role of philanthropy in the rapidly changing higher education environment. He proposes that society will be short-changed if the purpose of universities is seen as human resource rather than humanity. Dr Chan argues that the independence of universities is crucial for maintaining the balance between their dual role as engines of the economy and places of curiosity-driven research, and that a philanthropic public private partnership is vital to that. ‘Higher education is not cheap; but what is more expensive to society are the consequences of not supporting its universities… In a democratic society, governments come and go, and government funding priorities come and go, but a properly managed endowment endures.’ Dr Chan’s thought-provoking lecture ranges from pre-Enlightenment beliefs to the invention by Steve Jobs of the first Apple Macs, to demonstrate the vital role of universities to humanity.

The Inclusion Illusion

Inclusion conjures images of children with special educational needs and disabilities (SEND) learning in classes alongside peers in a mainstream school. For pupils in the UK with high-level SEND, who have an Education, Health and Care Plan (formerly a Statement), this implies an everyday educational experience similar to that of their typically-developing classmates. Yet in vital respects, they are worlds apart.

Based on the UK’s largest observation study of pupils with high-level SEND, The Inclusion Illusion exposes how attendance at a mainstream school is no guarantee of receiving a mainstream education. Observations of nearly 1,500 lessons in English schools show that their everyday experience of school is characterised by separation and segregation. Furthermore, interviews with nearly 500 pupils, parents and school staff reveal the effect of this marginalisation on the quality of their education. The way schools are organised and how classrooms are composed creates a form of ‘structural exclusion’ that preserves mainstream education for typically-developing pupils and justifies a diluted pedagogical offer for pupils with high-level SEND. Policymakers, not mainstream schools, are indicted over this state of affairs. This book prompts questions about what we think inclusion is and what it looks like. Ultimately, it suggests why a more authentic form of inclusion is needed, and how it might be achieved.

The Education System in Mexico

Over the last three decades, a significant amount of research has sought to relate educational institutions, policies, practices and reforms to social structures and agencies. A number of models have been developed that have become the basis for attempting to understand the complex relation between education and society. At the same time, national and international bodies tasked with improving educational performances seem to be writing in a void, in that there is no rigorous theory guiding their work, and their documents exhibit few references to groups, institutions and forces that can impede or promote their programmes and projects. As a result, the recommendations these bodies provide to their clients display little to no comprehension of how and under what conditions the recommendations can be put into effect.

The Education System in Mexico directly addresses this problem. By combining abstract insights with the practicalities of educational reforms, policies, practices and their social antecedents, it offers a long overdue reflection of the history, effects and significance of the Mexican educational system, as well as presenting a more cogent understanding of the relationship between educational institutions and social forces in Mexico and around the world.

Early Childhood in the Anglosphere

Written by two leading international experts, Early Childhood in the Anglosphere offers a unique comparison of early childhood education and care services, and parenting leave, across seven high-income Anglophone countries. Peter Moss and Linda Mitchell explore what these systems have in common, including the dominance of ‘childcare’ services, widespread privatisation and marketisation, and weak parenting leave. They highlight the substantial failings of these systems, and the causes and consequences of these failings. But this book is ultimately about hope, about how these failings might be made good through major changes. In other words, it is about transformation: why transformation is both necessary and possible at this particular time, what transformation might look like, and how it might happen. Part of that transformation concerns the need for new policies and structures, but even more it is about how the Anglosphere thinks about early childhood. The authors call for turning away from conceptualising early childhood services as `childcare’ and marketised businesses selling commodities to parent-consumers; and for reconceptualising them as education imbued with an ethics of care, a public good available as a right to all children and families, and complemented by well-paid, individual entitlements to parenting leave. Using examples from the Anglosphere and beyond, and in a context of converging crises, the book argues that transformation of thinking, policies and structures is desirable and doable.

Developing the Higher Education Curriculum

A complementary volume to Dilly Fung’s A Connected Curriculum for Higher Education (2017), this book explores ‘research-based education’ as applied in practice within the higher education sector. A collection of 15 chapters followed by illustrative vignettes, it showcases approaches to engaging students actively with research and enquiry across disciplines. It begins with one institution’s creative approach to research-based education – UCL’s Connected Curriculum, a conceptual framework for integrating research-based education into all taught programmes of study – and branches out to show how aspects of the framework can apply to practice across a variety of institutions in a range of national settings.

The 15 chapters are provided by a diverse range of authors who all explore research-based education in their own way. Some chapters are firmly based in a subject-discipline – including art history, biochemistry, education, engineering, fashion and design, healthcare, and veterinary sciences – while others reach across geopolitical regions, such as Australia, Canada, China, England, Scotland and South Africa. The final chapter offers 12 short vignettes of practice to highlight how engaging students with research and enquiry can enrich their learning experiences, preparing them not only for more advanced academic learning, but also for professional roles in complex, rapidly changing social contexts.