Environmental education (EE) continues to focus on enhancing people's ecological knowledge to encourage sustainable actions. This deficit approach presumes that once informed about environmental harms, people will work towards sustainable solutions for healthy societies. Yet research overwhelmingly demonstrates that knowledge of environmental…

The manner in which the built environment is constructed has a tremendous effect on the degree to which health, wealth and social outcomes are distributed within a society. This is particularly evident when a crisis of the natural environment affects the built environment, as was the case after the Haitian earthquake of 2010. Understanding the…

Although considerable work has been done around the supposed successes and failures of education reform in post-Katrina New Orleans, concerns about the public/private qualities of new policies are often not discussed explicitly. In kind, this article serves to investigate theoretical conceptions of the public as they relate to education while…

This article focuses on special education in New Orleans post Hurricane Katrina. After Hurricane Katrina, Louisiana's Recovery School District (RSD) took over 102 of the city's 128 schools with the stated goal of creating a "choice district" for parents. This "choice distric"' is made up of RSD direct-run…

The implementation of the Bologna Process (BP) did not go as smoothly as the Bologna Follow-Up evaluations suggest, and the consequences of the BP for the various European higher education systems and universities are much more diverse than represented in these various studies. Relatively few research and policy documents taking a more critical…

Taking the latest reform of Swedish teacher education as a point of departure, the aim of this article is to analyse the way Swedish teacher unions construct a knowledge base for teaching as a strategy of professionalisation. The analysis shows that the unions construct such a knowledge base from opposing points of departure. Their professional…

The article identifies and discusses three stages in the critical policy methodology used in the sociology of education. These are: firstly, employing a political economy theoretical framework that identifies causal links between global forces and local developments; secondly, analysing educational policy within that theoretically conceptualised…

From a human capital perspective, schooling has long represented an engine of economic growth, individual advancement, and competitiveness in the global market. In recent years, this theorization of schooling has become linked with articulations of national security in both the Global North and South, as policymakers, private sector actors, and…

In the almost two decades that have passed since the Swedish parliament declared that Sweden is a multicultural society, debates about immigrants, about multiculturalism and about different ways of being a citizen have raged. So far there has been no stepping away from the declaration. In the rhetorical arena multiculturalism is still a word with…

There is increasing attention worldwide to advancing quality education. Beyond a rhetorical aim, many international organizations and national education systems have articulated a commitment to promoting measures of quality education through the development of educational indicators. This article broadly explores the global influences on national…

Information and communications technology (ICT) is crucial in any contemporary society, especially if its online presence is to be widely significant, but, in a national context, it is important to investigate whether there is a compelling ICT "politic" in the education sector in Turkey. This study specifically focuses on the ICT for…

In its analysis of data it collected in 2006, the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) survey by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) used a variety of statistical methods to arrive at the 'key findings' that school autonomy, school competition and the public posting of student achievement…

This article argues that the chances of successful educational upward mobility are more clearly assessed when educational decisions are interpreted not as isolated individual or family decisions, but in relation to their societal and political context. In order to do this, the authors propose a combination of Bourdieu's conception of habitus…

The transformation of South Africa from a deeply iniquitous apartheid regime to a more inclusive democratic dispensation remains a huge challenge for all South Africans and its social institutions. The university remains one institution that is under severe pressure to transform. This pressure is exacerbated by the deeply entrenched apartheid…

In Ghana, several education initiatives for promoting the quality of education have excluded the issue of teacher motivation. Well-motivated teachers are likely to be more committed to their profession and this could lead to desirable learning outcomes. This research attempted to identity and analyse what teachers in public pre-tertiary schools in…