Children's participation initiatives have been increasingly introduced within various institutional jurisdictions around the world, partly in response to Article 12 of the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child. Such initiatives have been critically evaluated from a number of different angles. This article engages with an avenue…

Whether moral conceptions are universal or culture-specific is controversial in moral psychology. One option is to refrain from imposing theoretical constraints and to ask laypeople from different cultures how "they" conceptualize morality. Our article adopts this approach by examining laypeople's associations of moral character in…

This article states that the concept of time we generally hold is a spatial version of time. However, a spatial time concept creates a series of problems, with unfortunate consequences for education.The problems become particularly obvious when the spatial time concept is used as a basis for the education function that is connected to the…

This research tested the relationship between individuals cultural values and the malleability in their ways of knowing in two social contexts. Two hundred and ninety-two college students majoring in either business or social sciences initially received two priming conditions (two weeks apart) where they reflected on either their in-group or their…

Gender distinction has been shown to characterise both undergraduate experiences and outcomes. Yet research recounted in this article supports work that shows that young people are often unaware of such trends, subscribing instead to individualist perspectives that foreground equality of opportunity and agency. This article examines the gender…

This study organized five black American undergraduate students into a participatory action research (PAR) team to examine Cross and Strauss' (1998) and Cross, Smith, and Payne's (2002) functions of blackness theory (i.e., bonding, code switching, and individualism) within a sample of black American students, frontline staff (i.e.,…

This article investigates the legal, semantic, and material implications of Massachusetts' anti-bullying law through an analytic framework of structural liberalism. Specifically, this article asks how the law produces categories of fit and unfit subjects of the state through raced and gendered practices of individualism, paternalism,…

According to Eccles et al.'s (1983) Expectancy Value Model, the two major constructs that influence young people's activity choice are subjective task value and expectancy beliefs (Eccles et al., 1983). Eccles et al. (1983) conceptually distinguished four dimensions of subjective task value: attainment value, intrinsic value, utility…

How have U.S. high school textbook depictions of World War II and Vietnam changed since the 1970s? We examined 102 textbooks published from 1970 to 2009 to see how they treated U.S. involvement in World War II and Vietnam. Our content analysis of high school history textbooks finds that U.S. textbooks increasingly focus on the personal experiences…

Finland's education system is regarded as one of the most effective in the world. Shared values of the Finnish welfare society continue to influence national education policies that determine how education is organized, governed, and led. Findings from a national study of the superintendency, however, suggest recent demographic and financial…

Human capital theory has had a profound impact on a range of disciplines from economics to education and sociology. The theory has always been the subject of bitter criticisms from the very beginning, but it has comfortably survived and expanded its influence over other research disciplines. Not surprisingly, a considerable number of criticisms…

While education has been both open and online, the sizeable enrolment numbers associated with massive open online courses (MOOCs) are somewhat unprecedented. In order to gauge the significance of education at scale, this article analyses specific examples of massive participation derived from E-learning and Digital Cultures, a MOOC from the…

This paper puts forward the hypothesis that in recent decades, pupils of schools in the western world have been given a new form of individuality. This construction has been nourished by both the demand for emancipation as it was expressed in the critical sociology of education (and pedagogy) and by the neoliberal turn in education policy. It…

This paper reports on an exploratory inquiry into the perceptions of a group of second language (L2) learners of English with regard to their identities in English as a Lingua Franca (ELF) communication contexts. Drawing upon data gathered from two rounds of in-depth interviews with nine participants from a Hong Kong university, the study found…

This article seeks to elaborate the step of epistemological affirmation that exists within every movement of learning. My epistemological method is rooted in philosophical hermeneutics in contrast to empirical or rationalist traditions. I argue that any movement of learning is based upon an entry into a hermeneutical circle: one is thrown into, or…