This article reflects on emergent (radical-progressive) languages of democracy to consider what common educational institutions might mean today. It explores distinct philosophical and political tensions that cut across these languages in relation to educational organization and pedagogy including--antagonism versus exodus, transcendence versus…

Harvey Graff in his 1979 study of literacy taught in common schools in mid-nineteenth century Canada, demonstrated that beliefs in the acquisition of literacy for upward mobility and economic success were a myth. Moreover, literacy instruction was promoted by educational reformers and manufacturers as a means of controlling the working class…

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…

One of Canada's greatest public intellectuals, George Grant (1918-1988) studied history as an undergraduate, focusing on concepts and themes rather than minutiae. That same intellectual disposition surfaced later at Oxford, where he had gone on a Rhodes scholarship to study law. Returning to Oxford after the war, he left law to study…

Education for sustainable development represents a politically prioritized area of knowledge in contemporary Swedish education and as such it has acquired a prominent position among the governing values of educational policy. Insofar as education for sustainable development is directed at securing the future of human well-being, this article…

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…

We old warriors of ideology critique and "wissensoziologie" should not be too hard on ourselves for having forgotten reflexivity and the labors of putting paradigms, including our own, back into the context of history and social movement. Normal science is our necessary bread and butter. We achieved a lot by shaking the liberal…

This article examines the educational activism of two Arab civil organizations in Israel: the Follow-Up Committee on Arab Education (FUCAE) and the Eqraa Association (Eqraa). On the one hand, it explores the possibilities and limitations of the involvement of the FUCAE in the state's Arab education system, as a secular organization that is…

This article examines the symbolic boundary work that is carried out at a school whose student population is heterogeneous in terms of ethnicity and class. Based on ethnography, the article demonstrates how the school's staff seeks to neutralize ethnic boundaries and their accompanying discourse, while the pupils try to bring ethnic…

Based on a four-year ethnography, I draw on critical race theory and Bourdieuian theory of language to analyze why a Chinese Immigrant couple regarded their 1.5-Generation Chinese Canadian leaders at an evangelical Christian church as "Westerners," and how the leaders differentiated themselves from "Westerners" and…

This article ethnographically analyzes the practices of deaf young adults in Bangalore, India. As sign language is not used by families, schools, or other institutions, the church is a crucial educational space. Churchgoing provides deaf young adults with opportunities to orient themselves toward other deaf young adults, to develop new ideas of…

Although research demonstrating the effectiveness of youth organizing for educational reform has expanded rapidly in the last two decades, the field remains substantially undertheorized. This article outlines a theoretical framework, based on 30 interviews with leading figures in education reform, that illuminates how a youth organizing group has…

This study examines the relation between principals' leadership and teachers' organizational commitment, mediated by distributed leadership. Data were collected from 1,495 teachers in 46 secondary schools. Structural equation modeling indicated that the effect of principals' leadership on teachers' organizational commitment is…

This article traces the ways in which notions of diversity inhered in educational policies and practices to mediate the everyday schooling realities of immigrant youth in a Catalonian public secondary school. Diversity, even as it was celebrated and shrouded in liberal appeals to tolerance and cosmopolitanism, was also something requiring…

In many urban districts, the public education landscape is being transformed as private-sector providers such as educational management organizations, charter management organizations, and partner support organizations partner with or run district schools. While some private-sector providers' visions for school reform have remained static…