This paper takes as its starting point the concept of concerted cultivation as coined by Annette Lareau. It examines whether a focus on concerted cultivation adequately captures the various practices observed in young women's experiences of being privately educated in four schools in one area of England. We suggest that a variety of practices of…

In order to extend its scope, depth and effectiveness, critique should shift from its reliance on humanistic assumptions and be reconceptualised as a sociomaterial practice through which realities are enacted differently as multiple and tensional. This kind of critique counters the ways regimes of power are materially entrenched. This article…

This paper uses the example of an extra-curricular Graphic Novel Reading Group in order to explore the institutional critical reading practices that take place in English classrooms in the senior years of secondary school. Drawing on Stanley Fish's theory of interpretive communities, it questions the restrictive interpretive strategies applied to…

In the English-speaking world educational research is often conceived as the interdisciplinary study of educational processes and practices. Hence research in education strongly relies on theoretical input from a range of different academic disciplines. What is virtually absent in this construction of the field is the idea of education as an…

Reforms made to France's education system structures during the 1960s resulted in a repositioning of academic subjects within study plans. This article looks at three relatively similar subjects (physical sciences, natural sciences and physical education) and throws light on the arguments put forward to defend the purpose of each of them in the…

This article will explore education, pedagogy and praxis (morally informed and committed action oriented by tradition, and "history-making action") through the lens of the "relational". The article brings together empirical investigations of professional development and classroom teaching to explicate the role of this relational dimension, via the…

In this article we investigate educational leadership as a site of practice, utilising the notion of "practice architectures" as our lens. The latter shifts Etienne Wenger's more individualising notion of 'learning architectures' to a broader study of the systems and organisations that prefigure educational practices and potentially, leading…

This article reveals how educational policies and policy contexts in Sweden, Norway, Finland and Australia establish the circumstances which enable and constrain individual and collective teacher professional development as praxis. We provide insights into existing partnerships between universities and schools, and, municipalities and the state as…

Educational action is a species of praxis in both an Aristotelian sense and a post-Marxian sense: in the first, it involves the morally informed and committed action of the individual practitioners who practise education; in the second, it helps to shape social formations and conditions for collectivities of people. In this paper, it is argued…

This research examines whether non-school literacies can be used to teach school content. Debates around this question have hinged on two arguments: (1) that the structure of school literacy is not compatible with the structure of non-school literacies and (2) that literacies are so hybrid that their use across different domains is not an issue.…

This paper examines relations between media education discourses and teachers' reflections on their work with students around media. Based on a reading of curriculum documents and scholarly debates about media literacy, as well as conversations with teachers in Toronto, I ask how--and whether--formal discourses, common sense and local practices…

This article analyses the role of emotions in the constitution of political identity and boundary formation, and discusses the educational implications of that analysis in the context of citizenship education. The author begins by examining how affect is fundamental to the formation of borders, nationhood and citizenship, and discusses the role of…

This article examines a series of historical examples drawn from antiquity in order to describe some basic organisational parameters which have continued to inform modern concepts of teaching and learning. The author adopts an analytic method modelled on the work of the philosopher Luce Irigaray, in an effort to demonstrate how sexual difference…

The purpose of this article is to offer a critical discussion of the practice turn in contemporary educational research. In order to make the discussion specific, I use two influential theories, namely activity theory and situated learning theory. They both turn to the notion of practice in order to overcome the limitations of mentalist and…

Education is a key theme in Hermann Hesse's final novel, "The Glass Bead Game". The book begins with a narrator's introduction, in which the Glass Bead Game is described as a way of playing with the total contents of culture--of drawing connections between disciplines, knowledge and values. The main part of the novel is devoted to the life of…