This paper presents the results of a discourse analysis of the "Chronicle of Higher Education" publications about China in 2011 and 2012. Drawing on postcolonial appropriations of governmentality to frame the discussion of globalization as the context of the study, the author analyzes the stylistic, rhetorical, and semantic strategies…

This article offers a detailed analysis of two school board-level policies in British Columbia, Canada that address the experiences of lesbian, gay, bisexual, queer and transgender, Two Spirit (LGBQ and TT) youth to demonstrate how the language of the policy holds meaning and re/produces particular knowledges. Rather than offer an analysis that…

Social emotional learning (SEL) is common in preschools and schools both in Europe and North America today. Programmes for socio-emotional training and the rise of what is labelled therapeutic education have dramatically increased during the first decade of the millennium. In this article, a manual-based programme used for SEL in a Swedish school…

The central thesis of this article is that conceptualizations of accountability systems need to be more encompassing to accommodate the current diversity of school choice. This article examines an emerging type of school that specializes in advanced STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) curriculum for gifted and academically…

Internationally, "College for All" policies are creating new forms of vocational higher education (HE), and shifting relationships between HE and further education (FE) institutions. In this paper, we consider the way in which this is being implemented in England, drawing on a detailed qualitative case study of a regional HE-FE…

Growing consensus in popular and academic commentary suggests the lived reality of Western childhood differs considerably from its dominant cultural construction as an innocent period free from adult responsibilities. Sociologically, this disjuncture is conceptualised as adultification. Adopting a critical theoretical lens, we question if…

Research into literacy and school subject performance focuses overwhelmingly on identifying and addressing risk factors associated with underachievement. Strenuous efforts are devoted to diagnosing the causes of literacy failure that are patterned by ethnicity, social class, and gender. This study explores the possibility that equal, or even…

The aim of this article is to analyse how good intentions in Education for Sustainable Development (ESD) discursively construct and maintain differences between "Us" and "Them". The empirical material consists of textbooks about sustainable development used in Swedish schools. An analysis of how "Us" and…

The aim of this article is to explore aspiration in contemporary urban locations in the context of almost universal policy initiatives to raise aspirations of young people to participate in higher education. The article is based on a study of how children's career and further education aspirations are shaped over time in five schools in…

The launch of the Independent Public Schools (IPS) programme in Western Australia (WA) in 2010 reflects the neoliberal policy discourse of decentralisation and school self-management sweeping across many of the world's education systems. IPS provides WA state school principals with decision-making authority in a range of areas, including the…

In this article, we examine how our work in educational development, specifically in graduate student training, enacts the logic of neoliberalism in higher education in Canada. We approach this examination through a collaborative autoethnographic consideration of and reflection on our practices and experiences as educational developers, the design…

Discrimination against lesbians and gay men has been endemic throughout Australia's history. However, in twenty-first century Australian society there are signs of growing sophistication and acceptance of sexual diversities. Despite this, schools continue to be organisations where sexual "difference" is marginalised and silenced,…

Education in Finland is facing new challenges in the form of two related trends: "therapisation" and "projectisation". The concept of therapisation describes the ways in which ideas, discourses and practices from counselling, therapy, psychiatry, educational and clinical psychology become internalised and normalised in education. Projectisation…

Vygotsky saw mental and cultural development as "mediated" by artefacts, including tools and signs. He used his "genetic method" to investigate higher cognitive processes in historical context. These insights are foundational to sociocultural theory, which is widely used in education research. However, since Vygotsky, communicative globalization…

Despite its ideological saturation, recent neo-liberal education policy has been deeply depoliticising in the sense of reducing properly political concerns to matters of technical efficiency. This depoliticisation is reflected in the hegemony of a managerial discourse and the decontestation of terms like "quality" and "effectiveness", as well as…