The "Australian Curriculum: History" has emerged out of a neoliberal federal education policy landscape. This is a policy landscape where pragmatic and performative, rather than pedagogic concerns are clearly foregrounded, and this has implications for curriculum development and implementation. A useful way to conceptualise the features,…

Current times are witnessing multiple challenges in the economic, political and social domain, which modern citizens and professionals are required to address with an enterprising mindset. Young people have not been left intact by the spirit of new capitalism. In the face of ongoing educational changes on a European level, being a student…

Drawing on post-structural perspectives and analysis of television programs on education, the article investigates the public educational discourse in Sweden. It shows how a dominant neoliberal educational discourse is articulated together with a discourse of equal education, where the two discourses influence and subvert each other so that…

Popular television drama is an important discursive site engaging the public with debates about schooling and professional identity. Between 1999 and 2011, external discourses of "crisis" (of academic achievement or students' mental and emotional health) were mediated as alternative discourses of "crisis, failure, and…

Drawing on Critical Race Theory (CRT) and illustrating with examples from the English system, the paper addresses the hidden racist dimension to contemporary education reforms and argues that this is a predictable and recurrent theme at times of economic crisis. Derrick Bell's concept of "interest-convergence" argues that moments of…

Because the dynamics of race are wrongly ignored in a current shroud of post-racialism (i.e. re-election of Barack Obama as president of the USA, shifting racial demographics in the USA, etc.), there are still communities in the USA and throughout the world that experience the damaging effects of racism entangled with the realities of class. Many…

This article seeks to promote the generation of a discourse of the postmodern community work professional. A shared discourse will lead, we propose to shared capital. We argue that there is a tension between the modern and postmodern for those of us engaged in the profession of community learning and development (CL&D). We need to value…

The purpose of this article is to contribute to progressive school change by developing a more systematic critique of school effectiveness (SE) and school improvement (SI) as paradigms. Diverse examples of paradigms and paradigm change in non-educational fields are used to create a model of paradigms for application to SE and SI, and to explore…

British schools have been positioned by recent educational policy discourses as sites of innovation and transformation in new technological contexts, but more recent concerns about well-being suggest a more "affective turn" in educational policy-making. This article provides an analysis of a project which has explored the ways in which schools are…

Education reform continues around the globe, though questioned and critiqued in relation to goals of democratizing educational decision-making. Newspapers are one site of contestation and negotiation where struggles over global reform discourses are contextualized in "obvious" and "natural" local language. In this article, I argue that gender…

This article examines the intertwining of neoliberal urbanism and education policy in Chicago. Drawing on critical studies in geography, urban sociology and anthropology, education policy, and critical analyses of race, the author argues that education is constitutive of material and ideological processes of neoliberal restructuring, its…

This paper examines the emergence of Hyderabad as a hub of the global information technology economy, and in particular, the role of higher education in Hyderabad's transformation as the labor market for the new economy. The extensive network of professional education institutions that service the global economy illustrates the ways in which…

Although Detroit is not a centre of global finance, and plays a declining role in global production, it nevertheless participates in the present remediation of the relationship between cities and the globe. Manoeuvring to reposition the city as the global hub of mobility technology, metropolitan Detroit's neoliberal leadership advances particular…

This ethnographic study captures the processes that led to change in an Australian public education system. The changes were driven by strong neo-liberal discourses which resulted in a shift from a shared understanding about leading educational change in schools by knowledge transfer to managing educational change as a process, in other words,…

This paper examines literacy under-achievement and the limitations of gender-based literacy reforms grounded in essentialist notions of masculinity. It draws on qualitative case-study research conducted in one Ontario secondary school in a working-class community. It focuses on two grade 9 students and their teacher who participated in a larger…