Ronald G Sultana

Educators of the Mediterranean......up Close and Personal: Critical Voices from South Europe and the Mena Region Ronald G Sultana

Publisher Marketing: "A score of prominent educators from South Europe and the Middle East and North Africa region speak about their upbringing, their educational and professional journeys, their academic achievements, and their struggles in order to enhance democracy, justice and equity in their countries and across the Mediterranean. The interviews in this volume shed light on educational movements, challenges, and aspirations in a region that is attaining increasing importance geo-politically, and in comparative and international studies. These are powerful and critical voices, providing readers with fresh, often unexpected insights about contexts, cultures, and convictions that deserve global attention. The interviews with these men and women inform, intrigue, but above all inspire, calling, as they do, for an earnest commitment to a vision of education as a transformative, democratising force. In contrast to the global, totalising discourse that has increasingly defined education in narrowly economistic terms, here are the beginnings of alternative agendas, inviting citizens to 'read' and decode the world around them, and to confront power, wherever it lies. In doing so, the educators in this volume draw upon and put at our disposal a wide array of theoretical lenses, nimbly weaving these within a narrative that speaks about a lifetime lived in the hope of making a difference. These, then, are vivid, engaging, and reflexive accounts, emerging from contexts where democracy has only recently taken root, if at all, and from a region that has come to symbolize the return of the political, and the reclaiming of the public sphere as a site for transformation, contestation, revolt, and hope." Contributor Bio:  Sultana, Ronald G Ronald G. Sultana is Professor of Educational Sociology and Comparative Education and Director of the Euro-Mediterranean Centre for Educational Research at the University of Malta. He is the founding editor of the Mediterranean Journal of Educational Studies, and he represents the Mediterranean region on the editorial board of several international journals of education. He is the author or editor of fifteen volumes, and has published over eighty articles and chapters in journals and books. Most of his recent publications focus on education in the Mediterranean and in the European Union, and include Guidance Policies in the Knowledge Society: Trends, Challenges and Responses Across Europe (2004); Teacher Education in the Euro-Mediterranean Region (Peter Lang, 2002); Challenge and Change in the Euro-Mediterranean Region: Case Studies in Educational Innovation (Peter Lang, 2001); and Politiques et Strategies Educatives: Termes de l'echange et Nouveaux Enjeux Nord-Sud (co-editor; Peter Lang, 2001). He is coeditor with Michael Kuhn of Concepts of Knowledge and Learning: The Learning Society in Europe and Beyond (Peter Lang, forthcoming).