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…

Drawing on the work of Martin Nakata, this paper brings into focus the everyday complexities involved in the cultural interfaces that educators, both Indigenous and non-Indigenous, negotiate in order to promote children's engagement with formal education processes. Analysis of emergent data from a recent evaluation of a preschool education…

As nonprofit adult literacy programs are often the only options for low-income Latin American immigrants in North America, problems accompanying these programs affect the ability of immigrants to benefit from them. North American nonprofit adult literacy programs often struggle due to the difficulties inherent in using volunteer instructors (often…

Jacques Ranciere remains neglected within educational debates. In this paper I examine the potential of his philosophies for enacting critical interventions in relation to contemporary (higher) educational concerns. Ranciere argues against the progressive temporality of pedagogic relations and provides an alternative thesis that equality is a…

In this paper, I trace three traditions and bodies of work: The Chicago School of Sociology, the Birmingham School of Cultural Studies and the New Sociology of Education. Each of these traditions evolved in distinct though overlapping ways. Taken together, they offer a productive set of resources for thinking through the complexities of popular…

Public schools around the world have been hijacked and deformed beyond recognition by the forces of the economy over the past three decades. This paper provides an analysis and a way out of this miasma around the notion of the socially just school. While not another prescription, this orientation is argued to be the most hopeful possibility for…

In Myanmar schools, rote learning is the norm. International aid and education organisations based in the country have been trying to promote the child centred approach (CCA) as a much more progressive form of teaching and learning. The CCA is being rolled out principally through monastic school networks aided by international and national…

In this paper I draw on ethnographic data generated inside an English "special" school for boys designate as having "social, emotional and behavioural difficulties". I offer a detailed analysis of one teacher's pedagogic practices inside her ICT classroom and the boys' responses to this. I suggest that the teacher's pedagogy, and the classroom,…

This article addresses the notion of "being critical" in the application of the theoretical approach of Pierre Bourdieu to educational policy research. It stems from a concern to avoid a kind of "critical ghetto", where educational research is reinterpreted in Bourdieusian terms, or metaphorised in his conceptual language, without realising the…

This paper provides a critical review of papers in this special issue on Bourdieu and practice. What is different about this collection is that, in analysing policy and practice through a Bourdieusian lens, the thinking tools of field, disposition (collective and individual), logics of practice and doxa have been mobilised with regard to the…

In this paper I argue that values of democracy and social justice in education would seem to have been displaced in recent decades by managerialist norms that are linked to the presumed needs of business and the economy of the nation. I am concerned that conceptualizations of the nature and purpose of education, and of the roles of teachers, are…

Although alienation is widely recognized as a barrier to educational success for many students, prevailing explanations tend to focus on psychological traits and individual deficits, rather than the oppressive economic and social structures bearing down on young people. This paper addresses the issues of youth alienation and student engagement…

This paper locates the work of Leo Strauss within the broader conservative assault on modernity and especially its roots in liberalism. Four themes from Strauss's work are identified, then hermeneutically engaged for their relevance to educational practice in global times. The four themes are: (1) the liberal/modern concept of an open society is…

This essay examines Leo Strauss's pedagogical method in his teaching on rights. The goal in this essay is not to present Strauss's argument for or against any particular conception of rights. In fact, it is to dissuade readers of Strauss from seeking such conclusions within Strauss's texts, and to argue that readers' attention turn toward the…