This paper focuses on nostalgia in the narratives of vocational teachers. The aim is to understand the role of nostalgia as a mechanism for adapting to or resisting educational change. The paper is based on the secondary analysis of semi-structured interviews with 30 Estonian vocational teachers. In the teachers' narratives, the nostalgia for the…

This paper discusses the educational significance of the national museum as a reminder of the nature of home and its relation to nostalgia. I contextualise the sense of home in various ways. First, the national museum materialises the nostalgic claim of 'our' history, the collective memory and identity, which is in some way or other mixed up with…

In this paper, I discuss the nostalgic encounters that a group of preservice teachers experienced while reading two graphic novels about adolescent life: Jillian and Mariko Tamaki's "This One Summer" and Lynda Barry's "My Perfect Life." Using the conceptual touchstones of psychoanalytic theory, I pay close attention to the…

Nostalgia rightly elicits suspicion, even derision, for to give oneself up to longing for something from the past runs the risk of compromising one's capacity to act effectively in the present. But this does not make nostalgia, "by definition," either sentimentally reactionary or wistfully unreflective. On the contrary, in the education…

This paper focuses on the now-discarded practice of corporal punishment at Morris Isaacson High School, an important public school in Soweto. Corporal punishment, widely accepted by both students and parents, was central to the disciplinary regime of the school during the 1960s and 1970s. 'Morris' was one of the very few high schools in Soweto to…

The aim and focus of the early childhood intergenerational sustainable skill café was to highlight the potential of the lost arts and traditions of our cultural heritage. Kuttner (2015, 70, Educating for Cultural Citizenship: Reframing the Goals for Art Education. "Curriculum Inquiry" 45 (1): 69-92) argues for education to provide…

In this essay, the author attempts to complicate the reading of nostalgia in the cultural politics of education, arguing that the blind rhetoric of nostalgia for an idealized past can and should be critiqued in productive ways. Despite some literature addressing the consequences of nostalgia in the context of teaching, little has been done towards…

In this paper we draw attention to people who journey from one temporal and spatial setting towards another in the 'South', who aspire to a reconfigured sense of belonging, prosperity and wellbeing, and their multilinguality and multilingualisms. Through three vignettes of journeys we illustrate how in changing of place that linguistic diversities…

One of the more long-standing and commonly held views among educational theorists maintains that schools are one of the primary sites of social and cultural reproduction--sites where students are corralled and organized for the reproduction of the existing social arrangement. In this article author Gregory Bourassa argues that if this…

Teacher beliefs have a profound impact on instructional practice. According to Pajares (1992), beliefs determine how much effort a teacher puts forth and how long he or she will persist in the face of adversity. Many beliefs can be traced back to experiences teachers had when they were in school. Those early recollections of school events tend to…

The fiftieth anniversary of the Strunk and White edition of "The Elements of Style" is an appropriate occasion for considering its enormous popularity. Especially interesting is the esteem for the book held by Theodore Kaczynszki, convicted as the Unabomber. His embrace of Strunk and White's values points to a kind of violence and primitivist…

Bernstein (1999, 2000) proposes that contrasting educational discourses construct contrasting retrospective, prospective, decentred (market) and decentred (therapeutic) pedagogic identities. In different times and geographical locations the International Baccalaureate (IB) Diploma Programme (DP) has been projected onto a variety of pedagogic…

When selecting and evaluating historical children's literature, there are many questions that must be considered. For example, who will be reading the book? Is the imagined young reader of these historical stories a White, middle class cisgender heterosexual, able-bodied student who was born in the United States, or are child readers from all…

The fundamental role of school-university partnerships has been understood by a few, misunderstood by many, and dismissed by most as an extra, something a person focuses on if he or she has keen interest along with extra time, extra cash, and extra personnel. The concept rose to prominence in the late 1980s and into the 1990s; now, 20-plus years…

North Americans have had a lengthy and often one-sided relationship with Great Britain. Long after the waning of the British Empire and the apex of Britain's exercise of global political and economic hegemony, its cultural influence remains strong. Beyond the commercial successes in the box office and the bookstore, there is a much more immersive,…