South Africa still faces inequalities with regard to access to higher education opportunities. Foregrounding student voices at one university, the paper compares how students from diverse socio-economic backgrounds make decisions about going to university. The focus is on those who have succeeded, but ideas can be extrapolated regarding those who…

This paper focuses on the production of cosmopolitan capital among students participating in the DC Public Schools Study Abroad Programme, an initiative that has been lauded as shifting the narrative of equitable access to global learning. We draw on a framework of Bourdieusian ideas about cultural capital, as well as community cultural wealth…

Leadership has been increasingly distributed away from formal leaders towards more shared arrangements in Western educational contexts, wherein the vast majority of the existing research literature has been based. There is a dearth of literature on whether leadership strategies that originate in the West could be applied successfully to Asian…

The Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) has garnered increasing attention since its inception in 2000. Correspondingly, there has been heightened interest in 'PISA poster countries' like Singapore and Shanghai-China. Yet to date, little is known about the processes and dynamics of the construction of PISA discourses within these…

Based on a qualitative study of teachers, teacher educators and educational policy makers, this paper examines how political history is framed within national history curricula at primary level and practised within classrooms in Northern Ireland (NI) and the Republic of Ireland (ROI). Within the ROI, educational policy and practice appears…

This paper introduces a relatively novel theoretical approach to investigate cross border student mobilities in East Asia, a region growing in importance as a provider of international education. It does so by bringing Sara Ahmad's writings on the sociality of emotions, with Jacques Derrida's analyses of hospitality. We draw on empirical data from…

The goal of this study is to examine the distinctive features of International Baccalaureate (IB) programmes in Poland, and the role of IB programmes in the Polish education system. To address this aim, a review of the relevant legislation has been carried out, accompanied by interviews with teachers and students in 9 IB schools in Poland. Results…

This study aims to determine the extent and manner in which the notion of death is provided for in laws regulating school curricula in Spain and the Spanish Autonomous Regions, and to identify any differences and similarities among the Regions. To this end a documentary survey of current legislation, curricular regulations and educational…

There is a common belief that the more the time students spend in the classroom the more they learn; a conception which has been supported by considerable empirical research. However, most of these studies are correlational, which does not provide solid support for their conclusions. In this research work we intend to go a step further in the…

The aim of the study was to analyse literacy instruction activities and their associations with the reading performance of first graders in Estonia and Finland, two countries that share similar orthographies and educational systems but differ in the onset of formal reading instruction. The contents of 33 Literacy lessons in first grade spring were…

The knowledge production capacity of a country depends not only on its internal innovation factors, but also on its 'social capital' in the global network. International student mobility networks have become an important component of social capital that affects a country's knowledge production capacity. This study combines the social network…

During the first years of the new century, Latin America went through significant political changes in a period of economic growth. In education, we identify a 'regulatory governance turn' characterised by the emergence of four policy instruments: 1-New performance-based teaching career regulations with teachers' evaluations, 2-Curricular…

This article reports on research conducted to investigate student confidence in reading by collecting data from 135 primary schools in rural China. In the survey, we adopted the PIRLS scales of confidence in reading and reading skills test items. Our analysis shows that compared to the other countries and regions, rural China ranks last with…

Are we witnessing the rise of 'global' student protests, in the wake of austerity policies and globalised educational reforms? To answer this question, this article draws on a comparison of the claims, anger, and hope present in three post-2008 student movements: the student movement in Santiago, Chile (2011-2012), the 'Maple Spring' in Montreal,…

Universities around the world are increasingly orienting themselves towards global engagement in the form of internationalisation. This article examines how the importance of internationalisation and international research collaborations varies across institutions. Using data from the Fourth Global Survey of Internationalisation, it finds that…