Policy and Practice: A Development Education Review is the only journal on global education published in the island of Ireland. It features contributions from practitioners in a range of education settings based in Ireland, the United Kingdom, across Europe, North America and the developing world. It is in its fifth year of operation, and is now available as an open-access online publication to increase accessibility and global reach. It aims to widen the global education sector’s understanding of the delivery and effectiveness of development education at local and international levels.
12Professionalisation and Deradicalisation of Development Education
Editorial
“Washing one's hands of the conflict between the powerful and the powerless means to side with the powerful, not to be neutral” (Paulo Freire, 1921-1997).
This issue of Policy & Practice: A Development Education Review is devoted to the theme of ‘Professionalisation and Deradicalisation of Development Education’ and is centrally concerned with a number of paradoxes and contradictions that characterise the field in an era of neo-liberal shaped globalisation. It addresses, in particular, the question of why the development education sector endorses, tacitly or otherwise, the very ideologies and political-economic arrangements that are responsible for producing or exacerbating conditions of poverty and injustice, while simultaneously encouraging people to take action against this poverty and injustice? It asks: What are the implications of retaining a politically detached stance on crucial policy issues that the sector is ideally...

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