Course Syllabi in Faculties of Education: Bodies of Knowledge and their Discontents, International and Comparative Perspectives - Paperback

by André Elias Mazawi (Editor), Michelle Stack (Editor)

Course Syllabi in Faculties of Educationproblematizes one of the least researched phenomena in teacher education, the design of course syllabi, using critical and decolonial approaches. This book looks at the struggles that scholars, policy makers, and educators from a diverse range of countries including Australia, Canada, India, Iran, Palestine, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, the USA, and Zambia face as they design course syllabi in higher education settings. The chapter authors argue that course syllabi are political constructions, representing intense sites of struggles over visions of teacher education and visions of society. As such, they are deeply immersed in what Walter Mignolo calls the "geopolitics of knowledge". Authors also show how syllabi have become akin to contractual documents that define relations between instructors and students Based on a set of empirically grounded studies that are compared and contrasted, the chapters offer a clearer picture of how course syllabi function within distinct socio-political, economic, and historical contexts of practice and teacher education.

Author Biography

André Elias Mazawi is Professor of Sociology of Education and Higher Education at the University of British Columbia, Canada, and Affiliate Professor at the Euro-Mediterranean Centre for Educational Research at the University of Malta, Malta. He is also an Associate Researcher with the University of Geneva-based Equipe Dimensions Internationales de l'Education (ERDIE).

Michelle Stack is Associate Professor in the Department of Educational Studies, University of British Columbia, Canada. She is also the author of Global University Ranking and the Mediatization of Higher Education, and she is editor of a second upcoming book on university rankings and journal impact factors. Michelle has led several courses and workshops focused on building the capacity of teachers, youth, clinicians, scholars and scholar to engage media to expand policy debates. Her central research interest concerns how people, knowledge and institutions are categorized and the influence of these categorizations on our ability to grapple with "wicked problems" including inequity and climate change.