Pedagogies, policies and politics of mobility

Abstract

The contemporary transitions in the historical, ideological and localising practices of globalisation (and counter-globalism) are evident in global/national flows of students and teachers, individually or in groups. These organic flows of students and teachers include trans-national exchanges, internal migration and inter-suburban bussing. The innovative research reported in this special edition of Melbourne Studies in Education explores the complexities of mobile students and teachers moving from one suburb to another, from the country to city, from town to town, from one state to another, from one continent to another. This encompasses those students and teachers for whom travel is not be a normal way of life, but a necessity because they choose to or believe that they have no other choice than to move. The diverse and disjunctive movements of students and teachers constitute a key feature of schooling today throughout Australia, and are affecting educational pedagogies, policies and politics to a hitherto unprecedented degree. The movements of students and teachers of all kinds, the experiences of travel for those for whom movement is a requirement, the transfers of intellectual labour power, run up against the sovereignty of sedentary regulations governing pedagogies for producing knowledge, policies that resource different ways of knowing, and politics that privilege some communities while disadvantaging others. Drawing on cultural, political, sociological and philosophical perspectives the research reported in this edition of Melbourne Studies in Education reveals that student and teacher mobility is neither all of the one kind nor something peculiar to a particular time and space; each being an adaptation to and layered within changing culturalhistorical situations.