Social and emotional learning (SEL) is a growing phenomenon in countries around the globe. With this increase in formalized ways to recognize, define, and nurture social and emotional personhood comes a need for more critical attention toward the affective-discursive practices (i.e. culturally- and materially-habituated patterns of feeling,…

This article explores the normative representations of higher education students in seven films and television series from four European countries. Drawing on the concept of the 'independent learner' as an 'ideal construction', I demonstrate how these texts offer complex and at times paradoxical representations of who gets positioned as the…

This paper investigates the material complexity and relational emergence of 'teaching'. Reporting on a video-based ethnographic study of an upper secondary classroom in Norway, the paper centres on the following research questions: Which material-discursive practices 'matter' in upper secondary teaching situations, and how are participants' bodies…

Low completion rates amongst students from Black working-class backgrounds remain a persistent challenge to post-apartheid university transformation in South Africa. Notions of universities as colour-blind, meritocratic, and post-racial have developed around a deficit and victim-blaming majoritarian narrative that individualises educational…

This article connects instrumental, emancipatory, and critical approaches to Education for Sustainable Development (ESD) with the different cultural responses or grand narratives of the Anthropocene: eco-modernist, eco-catastrophist, and eco-socialist. The tensions between these different approaches are explained by ESD's reliance on the ideals of…

PISA for Development (PISA-D) was a pioneering pilot project designed to make PISA, which compares the performance of 15-year-olds in school, more suitable for low- and middle-income countries. This would allow the OECD to move beyond its traditional focus on more affluent nations and to play a central role in monitoring the Sustainable…

Screens are becoming omnipresent surfaces inside classrooms, namely through the implementation of personal screens at schools. This implementation reconfigures spatiotemporal organization of lesson activities by introducing specific screen mediated tasks that are majorly conducted individually on screens. By adopting the notion of timescape as an…

The process of reversing a neoliberal regime in highly marketised higher education systems entails the discussion of such a regime's normative principles and policy frameworks. Little has been said about what decommodification would involve or the implications of such a project for the constitution of a public regime in higher education. Two…

In 2019, Oakland teachers joined the wave of teacher strikes across U.S. cities sparked by teacher activism against neoliberal reforms that cut funding to public schools, increased privatization, and led to school closures. As in other cities, a group of progressive rank-and-file teachers working toward transformative change moved their union…

This paper examines the complex interweaving of the 'personal' and 'professional' in the affective labour of teachers. In line with theorisations of affective labour, contemporary school-teaching involves practices of self-work and self-making, as much as practices of curriculum and pedagogy. One emergent form of self-work, reflective of…

Research suggests that class-privileged students value learning for its own sake and study the liberal arts, while working-class students believe college is a means to an end. However, recent studies indicate that these associations are weakening. This paper investigates the link between class background, college values, and curricular choices,…

This article explores the role of affect in addressing the advantage conventionally accorded to high socio-economic status (SES) in higher education (HE) and how this advantage plays out for students from low SES backgrounds. Positioned as the 'other' to an assumed norm, the capacities of these students can be considered the 'wrong' capacities,…

Reforms to school climate policies in Chile have led to a marked shift away from punitive approaches for dealing with bullying behaviours, toward more educationally formative processes. Schools in this national context have also been given greater responsibilities for designing anti-bullying practices relevant to their own educational communities.…

The past 50 years have witnessed a growing presence of critical theory within different social science academic departments across the western world. The joint existence of a theory committed to exposing and criticizing various inequalities of the social order within academic institutions based on traditional hierarchies and prestigious…

This paper critically examines articulations of relationality present in education policy texts that shape particular discursive representations of relationality between students, teachers and curriculum. The policy texts of Australian state and territory education departments are considered as a set of discursive statements to illustrate how…