In this paper, we utilize the concepts of "racial knowledge" and "subjective understanding" to demonstrate how the metaphor of surrogacy encodes a racialized discourse via the epistemic authority of social science research. Taken together, we demonstrate how the pervasive use of surrogacy as a metaphor reflects the subjective…

Teacher workload is a growing problem internationally. In this article, we analyse an attempt by the state education bureaucracy of New South Wales (NSW), Australia, to address this through the 'Quality Time Program'. Drawing on labour process theory and Carol Bacchi's framework of 'What's the problem represented to be?', we analyse how the…

As an epoch-making event, Covid re-set understandings of teacher professionalism, raising the question what it might now mean to be a 'professional teacher'. This paper draws on data from interviews conducted in 2021 with eight academics employed in Australian teacher education programs as part of a wider study, "Critical Times: Producing the…

Aimed at rethinking the concept of service learning, this article draws upon the philosophical thought of the neo-Confucian thinker Wang Yangming. The inquiry is directed at a perennial concern that the prevailing understandings of service learning may encourage patronisation and domination in the server coupled with subordination and…

Drawing on a Foucauldian theorisation and an in-depth study with eight disabled student activists in England, this paper explores how persistent marginalisation and ableism in higher education has triggered a wave of activism among disabled students, who, just before the advent of the pandemic, had organised a structured movement, Disabled…

Lockers in middle schools and high schools in the United States are currently disappearing. Due to safety concerns and digitalized textbooks and other school supplies, lockers are becoming obsolete. As larger societal and technological changes drive this trend, the loss of lockers as a shared social space demands careful attention and…

The movie "Try Harder!" features a group of students at Lowell High School in San Francisco, California, as they navigate their elite public institution and apply to top-tier universities. A critical analysis of this film allows us to understand new trends and emerging discourses in urban cities, showing the way racialized groups are pit…

This paper uses critical discourse analysis and critical literacy to analyze the first in a series of literacy primers developed with US support for children in Afghanistan in the 1980s, called 'Jihad literacy'. The text is analyzed for its ideological content as related to the themes of religion, violence, and martyrdom in the historical…

In this paper, which draws on two years of qualitative research, I examine the ways in which refugees are positioned and position themselves in job training programs and in their initial US jobs. I provide examples of how 'factishes', a combination of facts and fetishes, are fabricated and position the refugees, and those working with them, in…

Projecting itself as the inheritor of China's past greatness, the CCP regime increasingly seeks to boost politico-cultural confidence in education and society and turn students and ordinary people into self-confident Chinese. This article identifies the oscillation of focus from victimhood to confidence in state nationalism and patriotic education…

In this article, the authors argue for what Édouard Glissant terms the 'right to opacity' in teaching and assessing communication and language skills in early childhood education (ECE). We draw from Glissant's writing on Relation, and his interrelated concepts of 'opacity' and 'transparency', to consider two vignettes from sensory ethnographic…

This article conceptualises studies in professional learning through the novel lens of 'reflexive empathy'. Reflexive empathy draws on Margaret Archer's theory of reflexivity, and positions it as an enabler of empathy to support researchers' approaches to providing contextualised, supportive professional learning for teachers who are involved in…

Social acceleration, the rapidly increasing speeding up of the pace of life, has been described and theorised by contemporary social theorists including Paul Virilio, Ben Agger, Thomas Hylland Eriksen, and Hartmut Rosa. While these theorists use illustrations from education, and others such as Foucault and Adam have considered the relationship…

Research investigating elite schools has highlighted how students within these learning environments embody and naturalise their privilege through discourses of merit, hard work, and innate talent and skill. However, relatively little is known about how privilege, and its associated discourses, moves with students beyond the school gate and into…

The figure of the teacher is becoming increasingly significant in schooling systems around the globe. In this article, we consider how the market-oriented system of schooling in the Australian state of New South Wales may be reflecting and (re)shaping understandings of who teachers are and should be. To do this, we present a corpus-assisted…