Africa/Kenya/12-01-2020/Author and Source: www.kbc.co.ke
Universities Academic Staff Union – UASU lecturers have issued a seven-day strike notice over alleged government’s failure to honour the Collective Bargaining Agreement signed on October 28 last year.
UASU Secretary General Constantine Wasonga says there will be no classes in public universities from Monday January 20th.
The lecturers say that according to the CBA they were supposed to be paid by November last year but the government has failed to honour the agreement.
They lamented about the ongoing blame game between the Ministry of Education, the Salaries and Remuneration Commission – SRC and the Inter Public Universities Council Consultative Forum.
According Wesonga, the lecturers are also up in arms over the conflicting figures owed by the employer.
Wesonga insists that the Salaries and Remuneration Commission had approved the CBA in its current form and vowed not to renegotiate.
Source and Image: https://www.kbc.co.ke/uasu-issues-seven-day-strike-notice/
Australia’s refugee policy has led to a two-track education system. Those processed offshore, and deemed refugees by the time they have arrived in Australia, are entitled to fee support for university. But the almost 30,000 boat arrivals, considered illegal entrants, can only access temporary visas. This means a degree has to be paid in full, making it the impossible dream for most.
Policies limiting education follow a political narrative that labels boat arrivals “illegal”. This narrative is difficult to change without widespread community support.
Groups like the Asylum Seeker Resource Centre are training members of the public in how to talk about people who escape harm, rather than debating the legalities of seeking asylum (“It’s not illegal to seek asylum”). These efforts require a range of community leaders, not just stereotypical activists, to rewrite the narrative.
My PhD research on advocacy communications indicated many academics are unsure of how to support people seeking asylum. Advocacy is often seen as an activity for seasoned activists. But like the campaign to get kids off Nauru, led by Australian doctors, academics can play an important role as thought leaders who can influence the hearts and minds of a younger generation.
Children who have arrived by boat and sought asylum in Australia will have experienced even longer periods of education disruption in detention centres. In terms of education, these are suitable only as transitory environments, as they lack adequate teaching staff or resources for longer-term schooling.
Children’s education is interrupted when they flee conflict and spend long periods in detention.Eoin Blackwell/AAP
Australia has no law specifying how long children may be kept in detention. One report estimated this was an average of eight months in 2014, though it can be as long as two to three years.
The Research Council of Australia commissioned research in 2015 to capture the human cost of disrupted and limited education for these children. One Iraqi teen said:
I lost my dad, I lost my brother and I couldn’t stay anymore. I came to be safe here. I came here in 2012. I’m not allowed to work, there are no funds for me to study. When I arrived I was 17. Imagine if you are 17 and you are not allowed to go to school. There are not funds for you to go to school. Now I’m almost 20 […] When can I go to school? When can I go to college? When can I have an education?
An estimated 4,000 children recognised as asylum seekers were in Australian schools in 2015. Under current legislation, they would be denied fee support for university.
Improving access to higher education can improve social inclusion and resilience, and help people seeking asylum make a positive contribution to society.
Working migrants are thought to balance an ageing Australian population and shrinking tax base. This is particularly true for recent arrivals from Africa and the Middle East with a high number of children, or second-generation refugees, who will be schooled in Australia.
One study found 80% of these children would be employed in white-collar professions if they earned a bachelor degree or higher. They would also be twice as likely to be employed than if they had only a diploma.
Academics can be activists
Several Australian universities clearly support people seeking asylum. For example, there are 21 full-fee-paying scholarships available to asylum seekers to offset the otherwise impossible costs of a university education.
Other initiatives include Academics for Refugees, with representatives from a number of universities, who want to add their voice to campaign issues. Many academics are using research and teaching to question assumptions and influence students as well as decision-makers.
Academics may not feel confident being advocates, but the potential of a professional voice is clear. #KidsOffNauru was initiated by a group of doctors with access to children in detention. They called on the government to release children on the grounds that long periods of detention were detrimental to their health.
The campaign to get kids off Nauru started with an open letter written by over 5,000 Australian doctors.Lukas Coch/AAP
Medics may be unlikely lobbyists, but they added a credible voice on childrens’ physical and mental safety. Advocacy groups credited the campaign with the release of more than 100 children from detention in 2018, though the Australian government claimed it had already been reducing these numbers.
Universities have championed significant improvements for migrants in the past through narratives that challenged dominant political discourse. For example, the 1960s DREAMers movement led to the tabling of the DREAM (Development, Relief and Education for Alien Minors) Act. This would have granted legal status to certain undocumented immigrants who were brought to the US as children and went to school there.
These teens had grown up in the US without permanency. They told stories about their American dream and initiated sit-ins and pray-ins across college campuses. The DREAMers campaign transformed the immigration debate in the US, keeping the plight of undocumented migrant youth on the radar.
There are clear parallels between the Australian and US debates around who deserves a permanent visa, with the education rights that come with it. However, an Australian narrative around the ethics of education access is yet to emerge.
Australian academics can help write this narrative through coordinated advocacy and existing research networks, or creative campus initiatives that give a voice to students impacted by immigration policy.
Academics are well placed to shine a spotlight on the human and economic costs of limiting higher education pathways for people seeking asylum.
Source of the notice: http://theconversation.com/asylum-seekers-have-a-right-to-higher-education-and-academics-can-be-powerful-advocates-121753
According to famed anthropologist Arjun Appadurai, the central question of our times is whether we’re witnessing the worldwide rejection of liberal democracy and its replacement by some sort of populist authoritarianism.
There’s no doubt that democracy is under siege in several countries, including the United States, Turkey, the Philippines, India and Russia. Yet what’s often overlooked in analyses of the state of global democracy is the importance of education. Education is necessary to respond to the formative and often poisonous cultures that have given rise to the right-wing populism that’s feeding authoritarian ideologies across the globe.
Henry A. Giroux delivered this commencement speech upon receiving an honorary doctorate at the University of West Scotland in early July.
Under neo-liberal capitalism, education and the way that we teach our youth has become central to politics. Our current system has encouraged a culture of self-absorption, consumerism, privatization and commodification. Civic culture has been badly undermined while any viable notion of shared citizenship has been replaced by commodified and commercial relations. What this suggests is that important forms of political and social domination are not only economic and structural, but also intellectual and related to the way we learn and teach.
One of the great challenges facing those who believe in a real democracy, especially academics and young people, is the need to reinvent the language of politics in order to make clear that there is no substantive and inclusive democracy without informed citizens.
Democracy Demands Questions
It is imperative for academics to reclaim higher education as a tool of democracy and to connect their work to broader social issues. We must also assume the role of public intellectuals who understand there’s no genuine democracy without a culture of questioning, self-reflection and genuine critical power.
As well, it’s crucial to create conditions that expand those cultures and public spheres in which individuals can bring their private troubles into a larger system.
It’s time for academics to develop a culture of questioning that enables young people and others to talk back to injustice. We need to make power accountable and to embrace economic and social justice as part of the mission of higher education. In other words, academics need to teach young people how to hold politicians and authority accountable.
All generations face trials unique to their own times. The current generation of young people is no different, though what this generation is experiencing may be unprecedented. High on the list of trials is the precariousness of the time — a time in which the security and foundations enjoyed by earlier generations have been largely abandoned. Traditional social structures, long-term jobs, stable communities and permanent bonds have withered in the face of globalization, disposability and the scourge of unbridled consumerism.
Social Contract Shrinking
This is a time when massive inequality plagues the planet. Resources and power are largely controlled by a small financial elite. The social contract is shrinking: war has become normalized, environmental protections are being dismantled, fear has become the new national anthem, and more and more people, especially young people, are being written out of democracy’s script.
Yet around world, the spirit of resistance on the part of young people is coming alive once again as they reject the growing racism, Islamaphobia, militarism and authoritarianism that is emerging all over the globe.
They shouldn’t be discouraged by the way the world looks at the present moment. Hope should never be surrendered to the forces of cynicism and resignation.
Instead, youth must be visionary, brave, willing to make trouble and to think dangerously. Ideas have consequences, and when they’re employed to nurture and sustain a flourishing democracy in which people struggle for justice together, history will be made.
Youth must reject measuring their lives simply in traditional terms of wealth, prestige, status and the false comforts of gated communities and gated imaginations. They must also refuse to live in a society in which consumerism, self-interest and violence function as the only viable forms of political currency.
These goals are politically, ethically and morally deficient and capitulate to the bankrupt notion that we are consumers first and citizens second.
Vision Is More Than Sight
Instead, young people must be steadfast, generous, honest, civic-minded and think about their lives as a project rooted in the desire to create a better world.
They must expand their dreams and think about what it means to build a future marked by a robust and inclusive democracy. In doing so, they need to embrace acts of solidarity, work to expand the common good and collectivize compassion. Such practices will bestow upon them the ability to govern wisely rather than simply be governed maliciously.
I have great hope that this current generation will confront the poisonous authoritarianism that is emerging in many countries today. One strategy for doing this is to reaffirm what binds us together. How might we develop new forms of solidarity? What would it mean to elevate the dignity and decency of everyday people, everywhere?
Young people need to learn how to bear witness to the injustices that surround them. They need to accept the call to become visionaries willing to create a society in which people, as the great journalist Bill Moyers argues, can «become fully free to claim their moral and political agency.»
Near the end of her life, Helen Keller was asked by a student if there was anything worse than losing her sight. She replied losing her vision would have been worse. Today’s young people must maintain, nurture and enhance their vision of a better world.
This was adapted from a recent commencement address given in Glasgow, Scotland, by Prof. Giroux, named one of the top 50 educational thinkers of modern times.
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This was adapted from a recent commencement address given in Glasgow, Scotland, by Prof. Giroux, named one of the top 50 educational thinkers of modern times.
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