This paper examines an initiative promoting collaboration between schools located in a city setting in Northern Ireland, which is broadly divided along ethnic and political lines. The schools involved, like the vast majority of schools in Northern Ireland, educate Protestant and Catholic children separately. This presents particular challenges for…

This paper adds to a growing body of literature which views global citizenship education as part of a broader social and cultural process of subjectivity production. Rather than focus on global citizenship in relation to pedagogy or curriculum content, as much of the previous research literature has done, this paper examines it in relation to the…

This paper reports on a year-long research study: four teachers of English, their Year 8 (13-14 year old) classes (110 students) in urban, secondary schools and a university teacher educator investigated the contexts for students to develop dialogic, exploratory talk in small groups. Assuming a Vygotskyan perspective, the study adapted a pedagogic…

This paper attempts to identify leadership practices of school principals as they engaged in exploring and exploiting possibilities in and around the school contexts to develop school capacity for change. Based on interview data of school principals, this paper shows that the capabilities of school leaders to perceive and exploit situated…

In recent years, there have been concerns in the UK regarding the uptake of particular subjects in post-compulsory education. Whilst entries for Advanced level (A-level) subjects such as media studies have experienced considerable growth, entries for A-level physics have, until recently, been declining, prompting fears of a skills crisis in future…

Two departments in a secondary school in England participated in "lesson study" projects over a five-month period to explore its usefulness as a vehicle for professional development. Through a cycle of two research lessons, conducted separately in each department, teachers identified challenges that inhibited the learning of their…

Schools in China and elsewhere are starting to teach English as a second language or foreign language (FL) to students at increasingly earlier ages. Although young learners (YLs), due to their developmental stage, are likely to be particularly susceptible to the influence of parents, parents' roles in YLs' motivation to learn English as…

In the democracies of today, school often have a dual role to play. Not only should they give students the knowledge they need to enter the labour market, they should also teach young people about democracy, and develop students' capacity to exercise their citizenship. A third task for schools is to enhance political equality in society by…

The concept of moderate learning difficulties (MLD) is not clearly understood in its definition and in its general use. Nevertheless, as a distinct area of special educational needs (SEN) this category has constituted about a quarter of all of those pupils identified as having SEN in England. This paper reports the analysis of findings from an…

One approach to tackling problems of division in society has been to promote collaboration and engagement between schools separated on ethno-religious lines. Based on some variant of contact theory, the received wisdom is that inter-group encounters can contribute to prejudice reduction and promote more harmonious relationships. Evidence to…

This paper reports on the findings of a qualitative interpretive study that was undertaken to determine how in-service teachers at Great Zimbabwe University were able (or not) to translate a theory that they were exposed to into practice during history lessons. Drawing on a range of data, the study explored how the teachers, who were purposively…

This study examines models of variables posited to predict students' homework motivation management (HMM), based on survey data from 866 8th graders (61 classes) and 745 11th graders (46 classes) in the south-eastern USA. Most of the variance in HMM occurred at the student level, with parent education as the only significant predictor at the…

As English has increasingly become associated with social and economic power in the context of globalisation, there has been a growing concern regarding achievement gaps in English that appear to be correlated to learners' socio-economic status (SES). The present study aims to examine how parents' SES and their behaviours and beliefs…

This paper outlines a theoretical framework which offers an explanation of the complexity of how teachers define their effectiveness in relation to their classroom practice. The research from which this framework emerged was a two-year, mixed method study of 81 primary and secondary school teachers. The use of repertory grid interviews combined…

The aim with the present study was to investigate bystander actions in bullying situations as well as reasons behind these actions as they are articulated by Swedish students from fourth to seventh grade. Forty-three semi-structured individual interviews were conducted with students. Qualitative analysis of data was performed by methods from…