This paper concerns the relationship between teaching and political action both within and outside formal educational institutions. Its setting is the recent period following the 2010 Browne Review on the funding of higher education in England. Rather than speaking directly to debates around scholar-activism, about which much has already been…

This paper reports on an Australian government-commissioned research study that documented classroom pedagogies in 24 Queensland schools. The research created the model of "productive pedagogies", which conjoined what Nancy Fraser calls a politics of redistribution, recognition and representation. In this model pedagogies are…

This article analyses teachers' experience in the period of educational change in Estonia from 1989 to 2010. We review the introduction of the new national curricula and national exams. We show how, in the teachers' experience, the period of change can be divided into two distinct periods. Firstly, the period of freedom and chaos in the early…

Historically, research in teacher education has played a practical role deriving its questions directly either from "the doing" of teacher education and/or having sought to directly improve "the doing" of teacher education. As a result, a tendency towards moral, intellectual and institutional parochialism has confined both the promise and purpose…

This paper historicises familiar assertions that English is qualitatively different from other school subjects to highlight historical commitments and sociopolitical effects of English teaching that are often obscured in contemporary pedagogical writing. It juxtaposes three different pedagogical literatures across the nineteenth, twentieth and…

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…

This article addresses the question of the role and function of contemporary higher education in western industrialised nations through a focus on the participation of undergraduate students. The discussion examines some of the dramatic changes brought about by neo-liberal educational policy, in particular the hierarchical division of teaching and…

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…

The paper takes as its starting point the relationship between the "New English", a curriculum movement commonly associated with the 1960s and 1970s, and the New Education, an influential general educational reform movement of the latter part of the nineteenth century and the early twentieth century. It inquires into the discursive-ideological…

Education is considered to be a crucial element of social development, but, in the global society, the legitimising principle of educational equality is altered by the neoliberal view that competition will improve the quality of any service made available in a society, which in turn will have a positive effect on the general welfare. The…

Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) has reached a certain degree of canonical status, as it is widely used and applied as a research and analytic tool. However, hitherto it has been taken for granted that CDA can be applied and practised anywhere unproblematically. There is still a dearth of scholarly attention that focuses on the tensions and…

This historical paper is an introduction to curriculum thinking in Japan. It discusses contested value frameworks that have exercised professional educators in the light of two "Western" interventions: (1) the modernization initiatives of the Meiji government of the nineteenth century; and (2) the policies that followed Japan's defeat in the…

This paper focuses on the historical review of neo-liberalism in Korean education with relevance to human rights education and teachers movement. In transition to post-colonial society, Korea confronts polarization of education. From the first stage just after the independence from Japanese Colonization in 1945 to the fifth present stage, Korean…

This paper examines the politics and values of the secondary school curriculum in Greece and attempts to find out the influences of cultural tradition and centralized control on curriculum development. In particular, it studies the decision-making process and the politics of educational control, employing some theoretical elements from centralist…