Search

The 'problems' and 'solutions' of modern education are overwhelmingly produced and tailored by the modern episteme, institutions, truths, and powers of the Global North. To find new ways of thinking and doing sociology, this paper will explore the outlines of a new Global Sociology of Education Imagination (GSEI) inspired by pre-modern epistemes selected precisely because of their distance from modern European standpoints: the ancient lost matriarchal societies and commons-based societies organised around shared goods in pre-modern Europe. Using Foucault's archaeological methodology, this paper finds inspiration in these epistemes to outline a new GSEI capable of questioning certain tenets of the modern sociological episteme regarding science, knowledge, truth and its order, roles, voices, commitments, and 'places'. It concludes with an invitation to experiment with a new GSEI inspired by these pre-modern epistemes, as a tool to openly challenge modern (education) domination and make it intolerable. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper argues that the mother's association with the child's schooling and educational needs is not just limited and peculiar to the middle-class families, as the literature suggests, but it is increasingly true of poor and working-class families too. This paper discusses how mothers from a poor neighbourhood in India straddle between household work, paid employment and children's education and how they envisage and support their children's schooling, at times going against the general tide to ensure a better life for their children. Other than highlighting the gendered nature of support for children's education, this paper, also outlines the nature of the differences and distinctions among mothers from a poor neighbourhood in terms of the family social status and educational levels. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Teachers' evaluations of students do not consider only academic competence, but are imbued with social considerations related to individual teacher and student characteristics, their interactions, and the surrounding context. The aim of this paper is understanding the extent to which teachers grade girls more generously than boys, and which characteristics of teachers and classrooms are likely to reduce this gender grading gap. We use Italian data from INVALSI-SNV, providing information on 10th-grade students linked with their teachers. The analysis relies on grade equation models in multilevel regression analysis, with students as first level, teachers/classrooms as second level, and schools as third level. Results show that, when comparing students who have identical subject-specific competence, teachers are more likely to give higher grades to girls. Furthermore, they demonstrate for the first time that this grading premium favouring girls is systemic, as teacher and classroom characteristics play a negligible role in reducing it. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The internationalisation of educational trajectories has emerged as a new form of cultural capital in education systems. Research suggests that the 'international capital' offered by language enrichment programs has become appropriated primarily by middle- and upper-class families investing in new forms of educational distinction. However, little is known about the appeal of international capital to different class fractions. In this paper, I draw on Bourdieu's theory of class and administrative data on French students and schools to examine the role of international certification in class practices of school choice. The analysis reveals that specific fractions of the upper-middle and upper classes are over-represented in schools offering international certificates. I use the findings to discuss the role of family resources and education system structures in the making of educational strategies. I conclude by highlighting the importance of empirically grounded analyses of the sociological significance and limits of international capital in education. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

VET colleges in China are positioned at the bottom of the educational hierarchy, absorbing the 'left-over' students with 'less desirable' academic records. VET students are stereotyped as 'stupid and lazy' youths suffering considerable prejudice in Chinese society. Drawing on Bourdieu's theoretical insights, this paper investigates the experiences of students in VET colleges and their teachers' perspectives on them. I explore how teachers' stereotyping habitus is practised in VET colleges and how it affects their students' learning experiences. The findings demonstrate that the teachers' pedagogic practices in class impose a designated cultural arbitrary via a hidden curriculum. The students adopted 'passing time' attitudes in class as a response to their teachers' 'misrecognition'. The paper examines how a system of unequal power relations in Chinese VET college is maintained and legitimised, which contributes to the 'transmission' and reproduction of the very culture that has shaped the standing of VET in Chinese society. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Studies have shown the ways in which non-Western middle- and upper-class families are seeking to educate their children in the West. The rationale for this kind of social reproduction strategy is the acquisition of 'valuable' cultural and symbolic capitals which can be advantageous in the graduate job market of both their home country and internationally. Presenting a case study of four middle-class Nigerian fathers, the paper reveals the rationale behind these fathers' decision to opt out of the Nigerian HE sectors. The paper focuses on three Western capitals – specifically institutional (a Canadian degree), embodied (high proficiency in English language) and symbolic (Canadian citizenship) – capitals which will position these parents' children advantageously in the future. The paper concludes by presenting an argument that in seeking these Western capitals for their children, these parents become implicated in the Western hegemonic discourse of 'West is best'. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the history of the expansion of educational opportunities in the UK, to understand how different generations of -working-class students managed to access HE. Based on 23 life-story interviews with working-class students, the study highlights how the changing dynamics of the structure of compulsory education and the labour market have shaped working-class students' views of HE. Exploring the changing structure of opportunity, and how this has shaped working-class students' sense of social position, is key to understanding the uneven pattern of working-class pathways to HE across generations. It is evident that different types of secondary school experience and opportunities in the labour market affected working-class pathways to university with the nature of the school environment and employment shaping various expectations. This article concludes that people's understanding of their social position within the educational and occupational opportunity structure leads to variations in -working-class transitions to university across different generations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Since the late 1970s, Britain has moved from a Keynesian welfare state model toward a mode of governance where economic reasoning replaces politics. Education in England has not escaped this shift from government to governance described as neoliberalism. This shift toward a new governing rationality has taken shape within the English education system since the 1980s through new public management regimes and networked governance; it has accelerated with academies, or schools run outside of local authority oversight. This paper explores how Multi-Academy Trusts (MATs), or chains of academies directed by a centralized Trust Board, takes neoliberalism's governing rationality further as opaque networks of power are consolidated. Through tracing the narratives of MAT CEOs, government officials and union organizers, this paper shows how network governance enables neoliberal rationalities to predominate within MAT structures where authoritarian practices become normalized. Democratic ideals become bumps in the road to market-orientated progress requiring removal from education. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper we begin to explore how knowledges being generated in bioscience might be brought into productive articulation with the Sociology of Education, considering the potential for emerging transdisciplinary, 'biosocial' approaches to enable new ways of researching and understanding pressing educational issues. In this paper, as in our current research, we take learning as our focus. Our work brings together collaborators from across fields: sociology of education; molecular biology and biochemistry; cognitive neuroscience; fMRI imaging; and EEG. Through the paper we explore the generative potential of an encounter between life sciences and sociology of education. Through consideration of the conceptual and methodological elements of our 'Synchrony in Learning' research and engagement with our pilot experimental approach, our research is suggesting that our central concept, learning, is undergoing metamorphosis, challenging us to understand learning as a phenomenon produced through the intra-action of a multiplicity of forces and processes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents an account of the development of the sociology of education in the UK, by means of an analysis of papers published in the field's flagship journal, the British Journal of Sociology of Education and its US equivalent, Sociology of Education. In particular, we examine the representation of two contrasting traditions in addressing social inequalities: 'political arithmetic'; and the more recent 'cultural turn'. We find that in the UK, the cultural turn dominates; whilst in the US, it is political arithmetic which does so. In accounting for these contrasting national profiles, we argue that they are underpinned by divergent social infrastructure and organisation. We also discuss some of the implications of the dominance of the cultural turn in the UK, specifically in terms of the relationship between the fields of academic research and policy and the development of a cumulative evidence base to address social inequalities in education. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Reflecting through the prisms of past, present ("the shape of things that are and were") and future ("the shape of things to come"), this paper discusses three challenges for sociology of education: the rise of populism and declining faith in 'experts'; inequities within and re/produced by the sociology of education; and how to enact a sociology of education that can 'make a difference' to social inequalities. The paper puts forward some ideas in support of a current and future practice of the discipline that is pluralistic and orientated towards social justice. Arguments are made for the value of public-orientated dialogue that is conducted in a range of registers and the importance of acknowledging and engaging with the 'debt' (Ladson-Billings) that is owed to minoritized communities and minoritized researchers. Finally, a case is made for a sociology of education based on the principle of service as enacted through praxis partnerships. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper considers the sociology of education (SOE) as a modern human science. It suggests that the SOE is mired in a set of unreflexive, redemptive, Enlightment rationalities, and explores the messy relationships of the sociology with education that result from this. It is argues that the sociology of education has consistently failed to distance itself from the metaphysics, optimism and oppressions of modern schooling. That it has failed to call into question either the basic building blocks of schooling, or what we call education – pedagogy, curriculum and assessment – or the buildings themselves, the spaces of education. The paper concludes by asserting to need for critique rather than simply criticism as a starting point for thinking education differently. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we consider the intensifying pressures on critical research and academic integrity in a research policy context that has come to be increasingly dominated by an instrumentalist mind-set. Using sensitising resources drawn from Geoff Whitty's critique of the 'what works' agenda, we reflect on the current conditions of academic labour and some of the key issues and dilemmas they pose for critical researchers in the sociology of education and beyond. In particular, we underline the trend for 'what works' agendas to become constitutive of academic identities and practices, including at micro-levels, such that the option of 'standing outside' them is shifting from being merely personally taxing to being institutionally disallowed. In addition to highlighting the dilemmas this creates for critical researchers and the threat this poses to expansive and democratic approaches to education, the paper emphasises the centrality of relationship-forming in understanding and underpinning academic integrity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores the status of girls' education in the schools of rural Balochistan in Pakistan, and examines the dimensions of access, enrolment and retention. In order to explore the complexities of this governmental problem, we will propose the concept of postcolonial Islamic governmentality. Drawing on Foucault's work on the arts of government, with Dean's (2010) writing on illiberal governmentalities, and the work of Salehin (2016) on pious governmentality in Bangladesh, we will suggest that postcolonial Islamic governmentalities emerge at the intersections of the legacies of British colonialism in Pakistan's post-colonial governance; the influence of processes of neo-liberal globalisation in the policies of developing countries by donor countries, development NGOs and the SDGs; and the forms of Islamic governance embedded in the juridical, cultural, social and gender relations of Pakistan as a postcolonial, Islamic state. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper reports the experiences of staff, parents, governors and students at a secondary free school in the West Midlands of England in relation to the inclusion of students with special educational needs (SEN). The paper is based on a qualitative research project carried out at a school that opened in 2015, with the explicit aim of examining the extent to which it developed as an inclusive school, particularly for children with SEN. In the paper, we draw on the classic distinction between 'education' and 'schooling' to identify tensions and overlaps between process and outcome oriented practices and examine the views of different stakeholders on how such practices impact on inclusion. By focusing on the day-to-day practices of the school and linking them to broader notions of schooling and education, we provide a complementary perspective on the current research on free schools, which is overwhelmingly quantitative and focused on admissions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper challenges (inter)national development narratives that propose schooling as a way out of poverty in the global South by interrogating poor children's experience of pedagogic and disciplinary processes in an Indian classroom. It also develops a theoretical framework to interrogate the relationship between urban poverty and classroom processes which attends to wider class and caste relations in the contemporary context of economic liberalism and 'political and social illiberalism'. Drawing upon parent interviews and ethnographic fieldnotes from a classroom in a state school it unpacks the term, 'labour class', used by teachers to refer to pupils' social background. Further, deploying the notion of 'deficit view' it shows how pedagogic practice, physical and verbal aggression experienced by pupils and pupils' struggles to engage with classroom teaching are shaped by realities of deeply stratified schooling, inadequate infrastructure in state schools and the relationship between 'labour class' communities and middle-class teachers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Social reproduction theory names at least two distinct traditions, one of which has a long history in educational research. Social reproduction theory in education emerged out of a concern with education's relationship to capitalist inequalities. By contrast, social reproduction feminism developed out of feminist interventions regarding the role of women's unpaid care-work in the reproduction of capitalism. In this paper, we suggest that the renewed energy surrounding social reproduction feminism provides an opportunity to revisit social reproduction theorizing in education. We review the fields' histories and ready the ground for an integrated framework. At the heart of this integration is a feminist analysis of reproductive labor in its contradictory relationship to capitalism. Expanding the analysis from the reproduction of capitalist relations to the reproduction of life under capitalism, this approach avoids the pitfalls of determinism and attends to students' participation and teachers' work in the contested labor of social reproduction. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In 2007, the Toronto District School Board (TDSB) passed the 'Students Without Legal Immigration Status Policy', commonly known as the Don't Ask, Don't Tell policy. While the policy assured undocumented students' admission to schools on paper, it remains to be fully implemented. In addition, given the discursive connection between immigration status, race, and criminalization, the TDSB has instituted procedures that further illegalize undocumented students including a more onerous and dangerous enrolment procedure. This paper examines the role of schools as border zones for undocumented immigrants in Toronto. It argues that bureaucratic processes and criminalizing rhetoric based on race actively exclude undocumented migrants from the school site. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Despite the overwhelming focus on young people who are at either end of the educational or social spectrum in policy and research, vast numbers of young people do not reside at these extremes. Consequently, there have been calls to focus more closely on young people who reside in the 'middle.' This paper considers the utility of the concept of a 'middling' category through examining four selected case studies of young people as they anticipate their transition onto a range of post-18 education, training or employment pathways. It highlights the ways in which intra-class fractional positioning, academic attainment, personal biographies and serendipitous moments intersect and interact to frame young people's decisions about their post-18 pathways. Attention to these multidimensional elements, over a reliance on categories which position young people within sharp social or academic groups, is crucial for fully understanding young people's decisions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Drawing on the dramaturgical theory of Erving Goffman, this paper explores undergraduate students' differing experiences of the Cambridge supervision system. Semi-structured interviews with fifteen undergraduate students were analysed to examine the dramaturgical demands of the supervision and students' perceived abilities to meet these. Findings that suggest that female students and those from working-class backgrounds felt less able to deliver credible performances complicate the University's celebratory account of the teaching system. The discussion draws out the relevance of these findings for scholarly literatures addressing student experiences of elite educational institutions, teaching practices in higher education and dramaturgical approaches to the exploration of power. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Valuable developments in the Sociology of Education over the last 40 years have involved the widening and deepening of analytical perspectives to include not only class-based research in education but also the complex interactions of class, race and gender in all educational, social, economic and political contexts. From a sociology of knowledge perspective the field has become historically more mature and multi--dimensional in its research and analysis of socio-educational contexts internationally. This paper argues that despite these progressive developments, one dimension is still largely ignored i.e. that of the religions of the world and of the social and cultural implications of these faiths for education today. Sociological analysis which elides a religious dimension not only presents an over-simplified view of social relations in the modern West but also fails to make an authentic engagement with education. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper attempts to work on a number of different levels. Firstly, it comprises my personal reflections on a career in sociology of education. These reflections are entwined with a history of the discipline that emphasises themes of power, politics and pragmatism. This subjective, and inevitably partial, account is combined with an examination of the structure and composition of the academic field of sociology of education and its relationship with the two disciplines it originates from, sociology and education, but also with the wider field of politics. The ways in which these different strands within sociology of education coalesce or diverge, and the consequences in terms of tensions, fissures and struggles within the field will be considered. I also discuss the subject and content of sociology of education, and its future possibilities for radical as opposed to reactionary or reformist agendas. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores how the contradictions of neoliberal education reform and its companion, the self-made aspirational subject, are embodied by Sir Michael Wilshaw, former headteacher of Mossbourne Community Academy in Hackney, East London, through his leadership practices. Wilshaw creates powerful mobility and morality tales that pave over the contradictions and ambiguities inherent in the academies programme and Mossbourne’s approach. Drawing on a larger study of Mossbourne, the paper focuses on how raced and classed pathological discourses are mobilised and inverted both by Wilshaw and policy rhetoric, cultivating compliance through a belief in the aspirational subject capable of transcending social structures. The paper argues that neoliberal academy reforms are not about autonomy, but the imperative to comply with centralised policy demands at the expense of democratic participation and accountability. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper draws on actor-network theory and on the sociology of cultural consumption to examine the phenomenon of corporate Massive Open Online Courses. Through an analysis of texts available in the public domain, the paper argues that over a short period (between 2012 and 2013) digitisation technology became associated with the emergence of a hybrid ‘actor’: the digital video-recorder teacher. A parallel is drawn between the ‘interactive affordances’ of digital instruction and the playback and cataloguing options that have contributed to shifts in television viewing habits. The digital video-recorder teacher is described as an artefact in the service of a postmodern project of self-improvement through cultural consumption, which recruits digitisation to meet a growing demand for ‘upgrades to the self’. In the conclusion, the paper explores how the study of digital education could benefit from an interface between sociomaterial studies and the sociology of culture. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper analyses tuitional practices after a major curriculum change (2005) in primary schools of Turkey. Group discussions conducted with teachers and parents in five maximally contrasting schools (e.g. schools in a squatter and a middle-class neighbourhood of Istanbul) show that tuitional practices, being only ‘loosely coupled’ with the official curriculum, are strongly influenced by generation-specific orientations in teachers’ organisational milieus, by orientations prevalent in the social milieus of pupils and their parents, and by different forms of capital on the part of teachers, parents and school organisations. Combined with empirical analysis, the paper proposes a theoretical framework that complements the assumptions of New Institutionalism by using the basic concepts of the sociology of knowledge and Bourdieu’s concept of capital. This framework offers a new way to understand the intrinsic logic of the growing differences and inequalities within and between school organisations in complex societies. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper contributes to a growing body of literature on widening university participation and brings a focus on the classed and embodied nature of young people’s imagination to existing discussions. We interviewed 250 young people living in disadvantaged communities across five Australian states who had experienced disengagement from compulsory primary and secondary schooling. We asked them about their education and their educational futures, specifically how they imagined universities and university participation. For these young people, universities were imagined as ‘big’, ‘massive’ alienating schools. The paper explores how the elements of schooling from which these young people disengaged became tangible barriers to imagining and pursuing participation in university education. The primary barrier they described was their relationships with school teachers. Our analysis shows how relationships with teachers can impact the imagined improbability/probability of university participation. We offer suggestions for how barriers to university created by poor relationships with teachers may be overcome. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper is concerned with the spatial experiences of Emirati higher education women students. It presents some of the unique ways they engaged with and appropriated their campus space. To understand and explore women's spatial experiences as manifested through their spatial practices, appropriation and emerging spaces, I conducted an ethnographic qualitative inquiry with multiple levels of data gathering and analysis. I utilized social theories of space specifically the social construction of space and Lefebvre's triad as a theoretical framework for this study. The emerging spatial practices of 'togetherness' and 'sitting on the floor' were highly informed by aspects of women students' identity and socio-cultural formation, with an evident link to their traditional past that intersects with their specific nation's modern demands and challenges. Although Emirati women learners' spatiality might resonate with that of other women learners, their spatial practices are context and culture specific. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As part of neoliberal reforms, evidence-based practice is increasingly influencing teachers' work. In Norway, the American programme 'School-Wide Positive Behavioural Intervention and Support' (SW_PBIS) has been implemented in a great number of schools. One school experienced an intense conflict with parents, so that eventually it opted out of the programme. Using Basil Bernstein's framework, this paper investigates what the conflict was about and how it can relate to class and ideology. The conflict was rooted in the ideological foundation of the programme, as well as its unintended negative effects. The teachers' unexpectedly persistent support of the programme may be explained by the fact that it offers them a way out of taking personal responsibility for a pedagogically challenging situation. Looking into the role the specific contexts play may contribute to a deeper understanding of the complex relationship between class, values and practices as teachers' hierarchical relations may be changing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores the changes in intergenerational mobility seen in Spain during the last century. It examines educational and occupational mobility, paying particular attention to the existence of a differentiated gender effect. The magnitude of the historical changes that have taken place in Spain during the twentieth century and the scarcity of studies in this field increase the value of this paper. More specifically, the paper seeks to describe how the situation has changed with the social–economic and education policy developments in democratic Spain, especially with regards to women. The main results show that while educational mobility has improved, there has been no such significant change in occupational mobility. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper provides a critical exposition and analysis of the work of an acclaimed Italian educator, Lorenzo Milani, and ideas that emerged from his experiences in two Tuscan localities. His work is well known in Italy and many parts of southern Europe. Despite the translations of his works into English and Spanish, in the early 1970s, and their use in sociology of education classes in the United Kingdom, he seems to have had a very limited impact on the Anglo-North American-dominated critical education field. The paper revisits his ideas, in this 90th anniversary year, indicating their contemporary relevance and the signposts they provide for a critically and sociologically engaged pedagogy. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper examines how Irish elite schools negotiate change and maintain their legitimacy in times of economic turmoil and rising social inequality. The paper argues that they have not bowed before the demands of democratisation or economic globalisation. Instead they continue to maintain a high level of social closure and control diversity rather than adapt to it. Moral character acts as a principle of distinction and legitimation as these schools pose as the moral vanguards of the nation, in a national context where the economic crisis is commonly blamed on ‘greed’ and moral corruption. Their discourse is based on the defence of a certain social and moral order, somehow at odds with the dominant neoliberal ideology, but consistent with a static view of society and an aristocratic conception of leadership, which their students internalise. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper explores the notion of a ‘just imaginary’ for social inclusion in higher education. It responds to the current strategy of OECD nations to expand higher education and increase graduate numbers, as a way of securing a competitive advantage in the global knowledge economy. The Australian higher education system provides the case for analysis. Three dilemmas for social inclusion policy in this context are identified: questions of sustainability, aspiration and opportunity. The paper argues that while social inclusion policy has ‘first-order’ effects in higher education, ajustimaginary is required for more inclusive ‘second-order’ effects to be realized. It concludes that transformation of the current imaginary will require a more robust theorization of relations between social inclusion and higher education, to give new and unifying meaning to existing practices and to generate new ones. Short of this, social inclusion may be little more than justimaginary. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper examines how one particular class of educational leader - international school Heads - relate to managerialism. Representing a novel site of new theorisation, the independence enjoyed by these leaders allows a ‘purer’ view of managerialism as experienced ‘in here’ (inside the subject), not just as a reaction to what is ‘out there’ (i.e. to policy). Through analysis of twenty-five face-to-face interviews, they were found to have relationships to managerialism that are not compliant or transgressive, educational or managerial, but hybridic. Some Heads relate to managerialism pragmatically; they reluctantly ‘do’ managerialism but avoid, segment and/or moderate managerial influences on their identities. Other Heads proactively use managerialism to discipline their staff and organisations; they draw power from managerial discourses; and they claim its values as their own. Seen through the lens of hybridity, educational identifications remain important, indeed they remain paramount, but for some subjects, they have been conjoined with complimentary managerial ones. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A priority toward creating ‘active’ citizens has been a feature of curricula reforms in many income-rich nations in recent years. However, the normative, one-size-fits-all conceptions of citizenship often presented within such curricula obscure the significant differences in how some young people experience and express citizenship. This paper reports on research that explored the citizenship perceptions and practices of New Zealand social studies teachers and students from four diverse geographic and socio-economic school communities. Attention was drawn to the scale of their citizenship orientations and participation (local/global). Drawing on Bourdieu’s conceptual triad and his species of capital in particular, the author posits that the differences observed between school communities can be usefully explained by a concept of participatory capital. The paper concludes with some reflections on the implications for young people who fail to access the ‘symbolic’ global participatory capital associated with much contemporary citizenship education. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper examines how affirmative action in Brazilian public universities has evolved from the start of the new millennium up to recent years. After an overview of the existing policies in public universities, we explain these patterns based on an analysis of the processes internal and external to the universities. Although these policies were initially thought of as racial quotas, class-based criteria have predominated, while the racial criteria became relatively circumscribed. Within the institutions, affirmative action brought new concerns about how to support and retain low-income students, as well as a discussion about racism, although the latter remains controversial. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper examines the experiences of children learning to read in a multi-ethnic London primary school. The data are drawn from doctoral research, based on ethnographic fieldwork, with children aged six to seven years and ten to eleven years. Reading is revealed as a strongly emotional realm for children. The children are weak to resist teacher assessment of themselves, but nonetheless seek to create consoling narratives against what they perceive to be the negative identity of ‘poor reader’. The data are distinctive, as resistance to school hierarchies and strong feelings about educational failure are manifested in the narratives of children as young as six years old. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper examines the long-term association of family socioeconomic status (SES), educational, and labor force outcomes in a regional US longitudinal sample (N = 2264). The results offer insights into the mechanisms underlying the role of family SES in transitions from secondary schooling to early work experiences. It was found that the academic achievement gap associated with SES widens during secondary schooling due in part to course-level tracking. Family SES relates to college enrollment mainly via its association with academic gains in school, but also through family income and father’s occupational status. Family SES is weakly but significantly related to adult offspring’s earnings but more strongly related to occupational status. Educational qualifications and cognitive skills make independent contributions to the explanation of labor force outcomes. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The main objective of this paper is to show to what extent and why students with the same academic aptitude but different social backgrounds have different odds of entering university. For our analysis, we separated primary and secondary factors of social origin in the formation of educational inequalities. The results show that the primary and secondary factors have approximately the same influence on the transition to university. Czech schools do not affect the process of forming educational aspirations and transition to university, and merely ‘classify’ children according to their social origin. This situation emerged during the socialist era and has remained unchanged after the fall of communism (in 1989). However, the mechanism of the social origin effect has changed – while cultural capital with a ‘direct’ impact had a major role to play during the socialist era, at present there is a rather ‘indirect’ influence through economic capital. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Social capital is generally considered beneficial for students’ school adjustment. This paper argues that social relationships among pupils generate social capital at both the individual and the class levels, and that each has its unique effect on pupils’ performance and well-being. The sample in this study consists of 1036 children in 60 first-grade classes in 46 Dutch elementary schools. Multilevel regression results show that a substantial proportion of the variance in school adjustment can be attributed to the class level and that both individual-level and classroom-level social capital have substantial effects on school adjustment. At the individual level, the size of one’s network is more important than its structure. At the collective level, social capital also has a ‘dark side’ because it can have negative effects on adjustment, lowering the academic performance in a class. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The majority of the still limited literature on education in non-metropolitan areas adopts an understanding of rurality as a fixed and known geographic entity. This paper departs from such a functionalist perspective to explore how rurality is constructed in a programme for at-risk teenagers in remote Australia. Drawing on a range of texts about the programme, including a documentary series entitledOutback Kids,we examine how the rural space is imagined as simultaneously therapeutic and disciplining and therefore appropriate for troubled youth. Alongside this discussion we map the way in which other qualities and values associated with bifurcated definitions of the rural as a place of tradition and authenticity, and the urban as a place of disorder and pretence, are engaged in the texts to endorse the programme and its practices. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Extant research on family migration for education has focused almost exclusively on the education of children. We thus know very little about family migration when it is driven by the educational projects of parents. To begin to redress this gap, this paper explores the experiences of families who have moved to the United Kingdom primarily to enable the mother or father to pursue a degree. It argues that, in common with what we know of UK student-parents, both choices about and experiences of higher education are strongly differentiated by gender. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper explores the process of transnational institutional matching between elite institutions in Singapore and Great Britain, and the role of state-sponsored scholarships in enabling this process as political and administrative elites are selected and groomed. Using data gathered from in-depth interviews conducted with Singaporean undergraduates studying at Oxbridge and a dataset of the institutional origins of 580 Singaporean government scholars, the analysis illustrates how students are being matched from two Singaporean junior colleges to Oxbridge and back to the higher strata of the Singaporean Public Service. We show that the educational trajectories of these government scholars need to be addressed in relation to the informational capital acquired in specific elite schools as well as the governing roles these individuals are meant to obtain within the state upon graduation. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The notion of ‘competitive excellence’ is an enduring cornerstone of UK educational policy. Most recently, expanding and adapting New Labour’s Academy project with the introduction of free schools, the Coalition’s approach advances and embeds competitive market-based forms of community engagement in education. Responding to this policy paradigm, this paper draws upon history in order to open up the notion of excellence. Through examining alternative practices of achievement and success in histories of community education, I aim to disturb the unquestioned attachment of educational excellence to the ideals of competitive meritocracy. Comparing across two community educational movements – Socialist Sunday Schools (established 1892) and Black Saturday Schools (established 1968) – I explore how achievement and excellence have been mobilised to very different educational aims. In distinct times and circumstances, both of these community initiatives practiced versions of educational achievement that challenged dominant knowledge hierarchies and underlying assumptions of incapability. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The health of children in affluent economies has become closely tied to the ideal of a normative body weight achieved by monitoring and balancing diet and physical activity. As a result, the education of young people on how to avoid becoming fat begins at an early age through the language and practices of families, the messages embedded in children’s media, and through formal schooling. In this paper we use the concept of biopedagogies to investigate how discourses that connect food, the body and health come together on Internet websites to instruct children on how they should come to know and act on themselves in order to be(come) healthy bio-citizens. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper examines the re-articulation of social justice as equity in schooling policy through national and global testing and data infrastructures. It focuses on the Australian National Assessment Program – Literacy and Numeracy (NAPLAN) and the OECD’s Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA). We analyse the discursive reconstitution of social justice as equity in Australian and OECD policy, and analyse NAPLAN and PISA as technologies of governance that re-articulate equity as a measure of performance. These re-articulations are set against the extension of neo-social economistic rationalities to all domains of life and the topological production of new spaces of policy and power. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In this paper we examine the factors contributing to gender inequality in secondary schooling in India by critically reviewing the government’s secondary education policy. Drawing on the findings of a study in rural Gujarat, we couple this analysis with an examination of the gendered dynamics that restrict girls’ ability to fully benefit from the education infrastructure and initiatives that do exist, using Connell’s Gender and Power framework. We propose that an extension of the government's current approach to educational reform, focused primarily on expanding infrastructure may aggravate the gender, class and caste asymmetries at secondary level. Fostering an environment that enables vulnerable adolescent girls to benefit from enhanced educational provisions is essential to realizing their rights and the achievement of an equitable system. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]