This paper analyses, from the perspective of the political sociology of policy instruments, the adoption and re-contextualisation of School Autonomy with Accountability (SAWA) reforms in Spain, with a particular focus on the region of Madrid. Over the last few decades, Madrid has adopted a wide range of education policies that have contributed to…

In this study, we explore how students identify and navigate the social structure of higher education and how, in doing so, they communicatively (re)produce socializing norms. To this end, we draw upon the work of the late educational sociologist Pierre Bourdieu to outline a critical communication pedagogical understanding of institutional…

Kappan editor Rafael Heller interviews Annette Lareau about her research into different experiences of childhood and family life. In her observations of families of different social classes, she learned that upper-middle-class families approach parenting as an act of "concerted cultivation" requiring ongoing attention, making them more…

"Just Innovation" problematizes taken-for-granted assumptions about innovation in education as "just" about new devices like laptops, computers, or smart-phones. It also aims to open conceptual space for considering what is "just," or fair in twenty-first century contexts by investigating the cultural politics of…

This essay centers the defense of black educational possibility in the work of historian, pioneering sociologist, and scholar, W.E.B. Du Bois (1868-1963) as a conduit igniting what critical social theorists Stefano Harney and Fred Moten (2013) call Fugitive Black Study. The critical appreciation of Du Bois forces us to consider the weight of…

The development of "international mindedness" is an established aim of international education and has recently gained prominence in national school systems. Despite its increasing salience, it remains an ambiguous construct and an understudied aspect of schooling. It is implicated in globalized educational markets and attempts to…

This paper has two aims: to introduce readers to Bernstein's concept of languages of description, interpreted through the lens of ethnography; and to demonstrate the value of this approach to theory-making by showing how a qualitative study conducted on these principles led to new explanations for gender differences in literacy attainment that can…

The potential for academic knowledge to "interrupt" inter-generational reproduction in education is located in the structural contradictions that shape knowledge and democracy. Since the late 1990s research in the sociology of education, which theorises curriculum knowledge using the ideas of Durkheim, Vygotsky and Bernstein, suggests…

Pierre Bourdieu had modest, peasant roots. He was born in 1930, in a rural family in the Béarn province of south-western France. He was the first one in his family to finish high school. His father, the son of a sharecropper, was a postal worker. Bourdieu, being a "scholarship boy," made his way to the elite École Normale Supérieure.…

In the half century since the 1966 Coleman Report, scholars have yet to develop a consensus regarding the relationship between schools and inequality. The Coleman Report suggested that schools play little role in generating achievement gaps, but social scientists have identified many ways in which schools provide better learning environments to…

This article examines how social media can incorporate into the higher education setting in meaningful ways using optional participation, active content production, and active moderation. The authors use two authoethnographic case studies. The first case pertains to pedagogical use through a student created and maintained Facebook group for a…

This article considers developments in conceptualising and responding to student disruption and disaffection. Commencing with the educational sociologist John Furlong's attempt to fuse psychology and sociology to better understand disaffected students, this essay also engages with a recent attempt at transdisciplinary considerations of…

In this essay we develop the concept of 'cosmopolitan nationalism', offering a working definition and suggesting ways sociologists of education might draw on it in their future work. We show how it is a useful analytical lens through which to examine contemporary policies and practices that navigate global processes (ranking systems, mobility of…

Building upon the genre-based research in literacy and English as a Second language (ESL) education developed in Australia in the past three decades, this paper reframes a genre-based approach to teaching Chinese as a Foreign Language (CFL) in a primary classroom. Grounded in Bernsteinian sociology while also working in transdisciplinary dialogue…

This article is concerned with the influences that are brought to bear on the design of school buildings and the effects that the design of these buildings have on those who teach and learn in them. The article also focuses on the ways in which design is altered in and through the practices of these occupants. We argue that there is a mutual…