Reviewing and discussing the development of critical studies in the field of applied linguistics in general and English language teaching (ELT) in particular in Iran, this paper attempts to highlight the main contributions in this field. Introducing a new growing critical-oriented shift in Iranian ELT community as the one which has been mostly…

Conditionalities are most broadly defined as the provisos that are to be met by a country when borrowing money from the International Financial Institutions (IFIs). Increasingly, they have proven to have far reaching consequences for countries entering into agreements with The World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, and the World Trade…

The major purpose of the study was to look into change and continuity in the policy and practices of adult basic literacy initiatives in Ethiopia and to deduce lessons that can be drawn from the experiences for the future of adult basic literacy program in the country and elsewhere. Data was obtained through critical review of documents on the…

The aim of this article is to forecast the present situation of citizenship formation in the field of Swedish education. In highlighting trends and tendencies in the educational assignment to provide for democratic citizenship in the first decade of the 21st century, which can be characterised as lacking collective visions for change, three…

Neo-liberal policies have been affecting in waves all public services in Turkey since 1980s. The most affected institutions in this process were education in general and the higher education institutions in particular. This article consists of two dimensions. In the first dimension, the process, in which the neo-liberal policies started with a…

The paper addresses national and global questions concerned with neoliberalism, social democracy and social justice. It explores a number of themes that arise from the British Labour Party's policy review and its rebranding as One Nation Labour (ONL). In particular it addresses ONL's approach to the economy, localism and vocational…

The experience of precarious employment is growing across the occupational spectrum and some scholars have predicted that there will be a corresponding rise in anger, anomie, anxiety and alienation amongst those affected. Exploring more intimately how precarity might be differently experienced and confronted, this paper bases itself on a dialogue…

Based on a case study in Swedish municipal basic adult education this article addresses current policies for providing individualized and flexible learning, which have been reinforced in recent adult education reforms. Concepts from the organization theory of "action nets" have been used. Institutionalized procedures and a number of…

Critical pedagogies are marginalized in the present common sense about teacher education. This also applies to the global South due to the co-option of conservative thought and neoliberal marketization as part of the present world capitalist system. This development creates unexpected alliances between the local and the global. However,…

Aspects of the Math for America organization's actions, aims and affiliations are analyzed for their effects on urban schools and society at large. These aspects are argued as evidence to consider MfA as an agent working against democratic practice and in favor of furthering profit and its resultant inequitable resource distribution. The…

This article evaluates the curriculum reform implemented in Turkey in 2004 by the Justice and Development Party (AKP). The curriculum reform targeted primary school education and reorganized the curriculum for several primary school courses. The AKP declared that renewed curricula would replace the former behaviorist approach, which had been…

Both secondary and postsecondary public education may offer one the last spaces for true democratic dialogue untainted by the market (Giroux, 2011). Public education however is under attack by "reformers" who seek to privatize it and transform it into a market good (Klein, 2007). Due to this, public education needs leaders who will fight…

In this article, I employ Jacques Rancière's conception of an explicative order to explore how the World Bank contributes to the global project of educational neocolonialism. I argue that the Bank operates as a Master Explicator who taps into students' "inability" to learn by themselves. It explicates concepts such as…

Since 2012, corporations, politicians, journalists and educators have asserted that MOOCs--massive open online courses--are radically changing North American and global education, and for the better. This article offers a counterpoint to the techno-deterministic and optimistic buzz surrounding for-profit MOOCs by contextualizing and analyzing…

Dewey's theory of inquiry cannot be reduced to the pattern of inquiry common to both common-sense inquiry and scientific inquiry, which is grounded in the human life process, since such a reduction ignores Dewey's differentiation of the two forms of inquiry. The difference has to do with the focus of inquiry, with common-sense inquiry…