This study attempts to explain a process of inserting global transnational elements into an undergraduate sociology course. After a review of global themes covered in introductory sociology textbooks, the author administered two projects (Global Multiculturalism and Sociology of Wal-Mart) in an undergraduate sociology course. The current study…

This article explores the influence of relationships on student achievement by examining empirical evidence and by adopting a social psychological theory. Initially, the issue is addressed from a national, Swedish context. Thereafter, two general questions are raised: (1) What is the influence of relationships on student achievement, according to…

The objective of this work is to reflect on unequal schooling opportunities in Brazil, focusing on certain characteristics that mark, nowadays, the schooling trajectories of young people from middle- and high-income families. Our previous researches showed that an important part of these families are increasingly investing in international…

The paper focuses on the auditing and accountancy paradigm that has dominated educational measurement of pupil performance for the last 20 years in England. The advocates of this minimum competency paradigm do not take account of the results of its dominance. These results include ignoring the heterogeneous complexity of groups within societies…

Motivated by very different goals, various interest groups argue that the British government should address problems with citizens' emotional well-being. Concerns about emotional vulnerability and poor emotional well-being amongst growing numbers of children, young people and adults produce ideas and approaches from different branches of…

This paper seeks to explore the relation between sexuality and pedagogy. This theoretical concern is examined with reference to two key pedagogical moments during a first-year undergraduate course about schooling and sexuality. Through critical reflection of these episodes it is argued that when sexuality is the intellectual focus of a course, the…

Academic development has played a significant role in creating university "learning and teaching" as an object of policy scrutiny and intervention. While academic development is a new field, its practices have been productive of new learning and teaching regimes in both the global "north" and "south". This paper explores the emergence of academic…

Schools are a stabilising feature in the unsettled lives of refugee students. They provide safe spaces for new encounters, interactions and learning opportunities. They also deliver literacy, the key to educational success, post-school options, life choices, social participation and settlement. Currently Australian schools are poorly funded and…

This article looks critically at Greek educational reform to the curriculum of compulsory education--reform that took place so that Greece could put into practice the decisions of the European Union of Lisbon (2000) for the contribution of education to the adaptation of the new data of the "knowledge society". Bernstein's theory about pedagogic…

This paper presents a study of dominant educational discourses through textual critique and argues that such an approach enables education studies to preserve an important distinction from teacher training. The texts deconstructed here are specific to English education, but the discourses at work have international relevance as the rhetorics of…

Drawing on the Queensland School Reform Longitudinal Study (QSRLS), this paper documents the assessment practices of about 250 Queensland primary and secondary classrooms and the extent to which they align with those pedagogical practices described as "productive pedagogies" in the research. In considering the extent of this alignment, the paper…

This article reports on Australian research that developed the concept of "productive pedagogies", a model that is deemed to be socially just and appropriate for the contemporary post-modern globalised world. The model extends the modernist one of "authentic pedagogy" developed in the USA and sits as a counter to the inauthentic post-modernist…

With reference to Bernstein's theories concerning the pulls and tensions of competing pedagogic identities, this article draws on original research to suggest that a culture of pragmatism may be currently rooting itself in English schools. This culture is understood partly as an instrumental response to rapid and extensive educational reform, and…

This article uses feminist methodologies of critical and personal reflections to consider the contributions that feminist sociology and sociology of education have made to developments in the pedagogies and practices of higher education, particularly professional and postgraduate education. First, the article reviews the contributions of women and…

The article aims to reveal teachers' dispositions concerning stability and change in the field of schooling and to suggest some possible connection to the social space. Forty teachers who attended a principals' training course were asked to write educational fantasies regarding their "dream school". A content analysis of the fantasies showed…