ResearchTurkey International Conference Call For Papers

CENTRE FOR POLICY ANALYSIS AND RESEARCH ON TURKEY (RESEARCHTURKEY) 

‘Exploring Turkey’s Education Policy: What Do the Global Trends Suggest, What Do the Recent Amendments Really Amend?’

Date: 13-14 December 2012

Venue: Middle East Technical University, Cultural and Convention Centre, Ankara, Turkey

INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE CALL FOR PAPERS:

Starting from the late 1980s, globalisation has quickly entered into the realm of the education policy in different settings, including Turkey. In particular, fast spread of the globalization process and the neo-liberal transformation introduced profound changes in terms of school finance, employee rights, curriculum development, privatisation and school-environment relations. Similarly, the lexicon of education policy was introduced some new ‘trendy’ concepts such as ‘productivity’, ‘performance’ and ‘human capital’ and governments and business groups started talking about the necessity of schools meeting the needs of the global economy. The global educational agendas promoted by international organisations, such as United Nations, the OECD and the World Bank, now reflected educational discourses about human capital, economic development, and multiculturalism, leading to intense debates between scholars, policy makers and civil society on how the education should be.

Recently, a controversial answer to this question has been given by Ömer Dinçer, the Turkish Minister of Education: ‘A new legal amendment is somewhat obligatory, which renders the primary education gradual, flexible and in line with the needs of democratisation and global trends’. Indeed, the most recent legal arrangements (the so-called 4+4+4 system, the Fatih project, the restructuring of the Ministry of Education with the Statutory Decree numbered 652) which introduced a thorough transformation into the Turkish primary education has been claimed to serve to this purpose from the start.

Against this background, this 2-day conference organized jointly by ResearchTurkey and the Department of Political Science and Public Administration of the Middle East Technical University aims to investigate current trends and changes in Turkish education policy by locating them within the wider context of globalization. The conference will seek to improve our understanding of following questions:

1- What is meant by the ‘global transformation of the education policy’? How are the concepts of ‘productivity’, ‘innovation’, ‘performance’ and project-based learning’ speak to this transformation?

2- What are the implications of global economic dynamics for education?

3- How does the relationship between education and development relate to the global trends in education?

4- Are the concepts of ‘immigration’ and ‘identity’ meaningful categories for explaining the transformation education?

5- To what extent do these debates overlap with the transformation of education in Turkey? Are the recent changes in Turkey regarding education (4+4+4 system, the Fatih project, the restructuring of the Ministry of Education) significant in relation to the global trends in education?

6- In what ways is education a part of the 2023 vision of the AKP government? To what extent is the 2023 vision related to the aforementioned transformation?

ResearchTurkey is pleased to announce its first international conference to be held on December 13 and 14, 2012 at Cultural and Convention Centre, Middle East Technical University, Ankara, Turkey. We welcome papers and panels from various disciplines including education, social policy, sociology, psychology, gender studies and economics digging into various aspects of the transformation of the education policy both in Turkey and in the world. Paper or panel proposals should be prepared for blind review and be sent to conference@researchturkey.org no later than 20 October 2012 with 3-5 keywords and a maximum of 500 words.

For more information and/or any enquiries: conference@researchturkey.org

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