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This paper focuses on the operation of heteronormativity in online and face-to-face dialogues about sexualities and schooling, and seeks to tease out the means through which this operation is enacted. The data arise from two linked research projects focusing on participants' perceptions and concerns about addressing issues related to sexual orientation in school contexts. Analysis of data from both sources showed that participants' narratives were embedded (often without the participants' recognition) in the heteronormative, through the inscription and reinscription of specific identity categories that fixed heterosexuality as the normative centre. Revisiting these data as a whole, we draw upon Youdell's notion of 'wounds and reinscrptions' and Bakhtin's notion of carnivalistic inversion to explore the virtual impossibility of imagining the homonormative. From this exercise we derive important lessons for ourselves as educators and researchers about how offering new imaginaries might enhance the possibilities for social justice and social change. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines claims that recent reforms to UK education have led to significant organisational changes in primary school and higher education. It also examines two main theoretical explanations for these, namely post-Fordism and New Managerialism. Examples of changes in both schools and universities, including flexibility and teamwork, are explored. Up to the mid-1980s, publicly funded educational organisations did display bureaucratic features, including rules, staff hierarchies and complex procedures. However, professionals employed in these organisations retained discretion and autonomy in their work. Since then, the introduction of an audit culture and a greater emphasis on management and regulation of the work of teachers and academics has decreased discretion and autonomy. This paper suggests that theories of New Managerialism offer a more satisfactory explanation of the changes explored than post-Fordism, which has more often been used as a normative model of what contemporary organisations should look like. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper draws on research in three English Midlands local education authorities to analyse the changing role of the teacher trade union representative in schools. It focuses on representatives of the largest teachers' union in England and Wales--the National Union of Teachers. The paper draws on mainstream industrial relations literature, and more recent research into school sector industrial relations, to assess how the role of the union representative is changing in an era of autonomous schools. The research indicates that new issues are emerging in schools, and these have the potential to transform the role of the representative. Where representatives can respond to the emergence of these new issues there is the prospect of a new, more participative trade union culture developing in schools. However, it is far from certain that school union representatives will want to assume these increased responsibilities, and this poses a major challenge for the development of teacher trade unionism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper analyses producer agency in the structural setting of the schools public-market. The initial focus for this analysis was the nature of competition, but, it is argued, the character of engagement with the public-market is better represented by inter-connecting and mutually influential modes of engagement (competitive, professional, bureaucratic, cultural) elaborated in the paper. These have been developed through analyses of headteachers’ accounts (one of the data sets in a study of the impact of competition on secondary schools), in a process of ‘dialogue’ with relevant literature, and build upon prior work by the author. The elaboration of the modes is set within the theoretical frame of analytical dualism. Conclusions highlight, inter alia, the tendency for competitive engagement to be present in a subordinated, although nevertheless significant, form, and the continual inter-weaving of different foms of engagement, at the core of which is an increasingly permeable public professional model . [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper is one of a number of related pieces which address the issue of parental choice through a careful Straussian analysis of interview data. The focus here is upon the structures and processes underlying the use of grapevine' knowledge, which parents elicit and disseminate in choosing a school. It is argued that this immediate or `hot' knowledge is of particular importance to many parents and is set over and against the `cold' formal knowledge produced by schools themselves or published as examination results or league tables. Grapevine knowledge is socially embedded in networks and localities and is distributed unevenly across and used differently by different social-class groups. The Paper concludes by suggesting that the stress and anxiety involved in choice for man)' parents is a product of unstable cultural values, and the slippery signs systems now surrounding `school' at a time of increased economic uncertainty. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The provisions of the Higher Education Act (2004) have renewed interest in widening participation research. Therefore, this paper explores the development of this scholarly field, primarily in the United Kingdom, by examining major trends in the study of higher education. Political debates related to higher education, the prevailing structure of the sector and predominant sociological perspectives have largely shaped the empirical and theoretical concerns of widening participation research. These delimiting factors have resulted in incomplete accounts of the barriers to higher education, which do not fully explore the relationship between students' social characteristics, learning experiences and university careers. Furthermore, contemporary research runs the risk of reinventing the wheel and replicating the mistakes of the past, since there has been a collective act of forgetfulness with respect to earlier contributions. In contrast, this paper provides guidelines to facilitate a holistic agenda for future widening participation research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Studies on bullying at school proliferate, but the discourse is seriously lacking in sociological perspective. The explanation as to why some students bully others has been sought primarily within the personal attributes of the bully and the victim. Despite the fact that the school is the place where most bullying occurs, school factors that are correlated with the prevalence of bullying have been under-investigated. In Japan, however, schools have been subject to great scrutiny. By reviewing the Japanese literature on bullying (ijime), this paper discusses factors that appear to contribute to the school climate in which bullying among students becomes commonplace. These include authoritarian, hierarchical, and power-dominant human relationships, alienating modes of learning, high levels of regimentation, dehumanising methods of discipline, and highly interventionist human relationships in an excessively group-oriented social environment. The paper suggests the paradigm of student bullying needs to be re-thought. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper focuses on patents' involvement with their child's schooling and the possible influences upon this. At a time when parental involvement is regarded as being highly important to a child's school achievement and given the Government's promotion of the role of parents in education, the conditions should be particularly conducive to involving all parents in this significant role. It will be argued, however, that in spite of increased statutory rights and a changing attitude towards parents by teachers and schools, parents' social class location continues to have a direct impact upon their ability to intervene in their child's schooling. The paper concludes that increased parental involvement is probably desirable but the nature of this and its operationalisation needs to be carefully thought out. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper reports evidence from an ethnographic study of two primary schools in a large town in Northern France. The schools are located markedly different socio-economic settings. One is in an affluent area near the centre while the other is situated on a run down municipal housing estate on the outskirts in an officially designated educational priority zone. Despite their widely divergent social situations the two schools are strikingly similar and can be seen to be providing homogeneous educational experience for two socially heterogeneous populations. In the second half of the paper the notion of `national context' is explored and its usefulness as an explanatory theoretical concept for analysing this educational homogeneity is suggested. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, the argument is made that forms of consciousness, knowledge, sentiments and values that teachers use as part of their cultural repertoires in schools are the result of social constitution The `social' is composed of a number of overlapping discourses that are characteristic of schools everywhere `Teacher culture' is a signifier for the production and consumption of these discourses Recent trends to emphasise the plurality of teacher culture(s) are countered by a review of work that suggests more uniformity in teacher culture. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Educational selection has been a central issue for Structural Functionalist, Marxist and Interpretative sociologists of education While knowledge about selection processes within schools has increased over the past two decades, as a result of ethnographic studies of schooling, the social process of collective teacher decision making, when teachers are engaged in institutional channelling, has been largely neglected This paper explores collective teacher decision making at a point of allocation through the medium of a case study of setting in one 9-13 years middle school The paper argues that the discussion concerning the recent initiatives of educational selection embodied in modularisation, pupil assessment, common examinations and national testing should be informed by research of teacher interaction at points of allocation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper examines the complexity of West Indian pupils' adaptations to school Their situation is such that ability, hard work and a commitment to academic achievement may not be sufficient in the struggle for academic success West Indian pupils face the additional barrier of staff ethnocentrism, which must be handled without reinforcing the widespread belief that they represent a challenge to teachers' authority The size of this task is examined through the use of detailed case studies of pupils drawn from ethnographic research in a single multi-ethnic inner-city Comprehensive The paper describes the strategies which allowed one West Indian pupil to succeed academically, whilst a group of his peers experienced increasingly conflictual teacher-pupil relations which culminated in academic failure and, in one case, expulsion from the school. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper is about middle schools and the effects of recent policies on the curricula organisation of six of them. We begin by establishing some general links between middle school origins, brief history and development, and wider economic and political forces for change Drawing on four years of research with a group of schools in one local authority, we describe some of the directions of change which followed the Great Debate. We highlight recent changes as these schools came under increasing bureaucratic control, with the emphasis on the organisation of pupil selection and changes from mixed ability grouping, to setting, and back to mixed ability groups. We conclude with some theoretical discussion related to the work of Habermas. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines issues of selection, merging an analysis of policy with data from a qualitative case study. It focuses on the 'modernisation of the comprehensive principle' proposed by New Labour, in which selection within schools (through setting 'by ability') is increasingly encouraged. Data collected at an inner-city, multi-ethnic comprehensive school are used to illustrate how discourses on selection are being reworked locally. The school was largely supportive of setting, despite some teachers acknowledging that the practice prioritised high-achieving pupils with perceived 'good attitudes'. In the form under study, setting involved disadvantaged pupils from ethnic-minority backgrounds, particularly those who received support in English as an Additional Language. It is concluded that setting did not contribute to an inclusive agenda for education, in spite of government claims of increased 'standards for all'. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Distributed leadership has come to prominence in school management discourse as a means to achieve the participation and empowerment of teachers and to create democratic schools. In this paper I explore the contradictions between these claims and both the hierarchical power structure of schools and the use of distributed leadership to secure the commitment of teachers to government education agendas. I examine how the relationship between distributed leadership and managerial power is addressed in the discourse of education management theorists and the practice of headteachers. Examples of authentically democratic schools based on collective self-management provide the basis for questioning the hegemonic hierarchical model. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper I address the question: How is it that people come to choose mathematics and in what ways is this process gendered? I draw on the findings of a qualitative research study involving interviews with 43 young people all studying mathematics in post-compulsory education in England. Working within a post-structuralist framework, I argue that gender is a project and one that is achieved in interaction with others. Through a detailed reading of Toni and Claudia's stories I explore the tensions for young women who are engaging in mathematics, something that is discursively inscribed as masculine, while (understandably) being invested in producing themselves as female. I conclude by arguing that seeing 'doing mathematics' as 'doing masculinity' is a productive way of understanding why mathematics is so male dominated and by looking at the implications of this understanding for gender and mathematics reform work. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper argues that growing inequalities make it imperative that schools reinvent themselves around the issue of social justice. Through a case study of an Australian primary school, teacher-based forms of social capital are explored revealing progressive pedagogies to be an important precursor to the 'socially just school'. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article addresses an enduring concern in the sociology of education: how social class differences are reproduced through schooling. In particular it focuses on the functioning of pedagogy in this regard. The article presents a model that elucidates the inner logic of pedagogy in order to reveal the structuring of inequality with respect to different groups of students. Theoretical concepts are drawn from the work of Bernstein, Dowling (1998) and Pedro (1981). An analysis considering the relay of social class differences, what is relayed, and its organizational form is undertaken with respect to working class and middle class children learning literacy in a sample of South African primary schools. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article is concerned with the theoretical constructs of Bourdieu and their contribution to understanding the reproduction of social and cultural inequalities in schooling. While Bourdieu has been criticised for his reproductive emphasis, this article proposes that there is transformative potential in his theoretical constructs and that these suggest possibilities for schools and teachers to improve the educational outcomes of marginalised students. The article draws together three areas of contribution to this theme of transformation; beginning by characterising habitus as constituted by reproductive and transformative traits and considering the possibilities for the restructuring of students' habitus. This is followed by a discussion of cultural capital and the way that teachers can draw upon a variety of cultural capitals to act as agents of transformation rather than reproduction. The article concludes by considering the necessity of a transformation of the field to improve the educational outcomes of marginalised students. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The teacher's body has a dubious status within contemporary pedagogic practice. The impact of progressivism in many western countries, with its emphasis on student-centred learning, has resulted in a marginalisation of the teacher's role in many classrooms. While its influence appears to be waning, in Australian primary schools, student-centred methodologies such as group-based and independent learning tend to dominate classroom practice. Relegated to the role of facilitator the teacher's overall presence and bodily impact in classrooms has been greatly reduced. Drawing on a study of the practice of two kindergarten teachers in two schools in Sydney, Australia, this article will examine the ways in which they embody pedagogic space, the regimen they create and the techniques they employ in teaching their students how to write. In a sense the title 'Disparate bodies' has a dual focus. Not only does it relate to the different ways in which the two teachers deploy their bodies in the classroom, it also refers to the differential embodiment of their students which results from the affects that their teachers' pedagogies engender. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Professions are occupational arrangements for dealing with human problems. Professional 'people work' requires a certain interactive closeness; face-to-face communication is prominent in professional-client relations. This also seems the case in the educational system. But in education, organization provides the raison d'être of this profession. This organizational infrastructure enables and delimits educational interaction. The school bureaucracy is criticized by the profession; the profession has an outspoken interest in reforming its organizational infrastructure again, again and again. This article provides a theoretical analysis of teaching, which elucidates this relation between profession, organization and work. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The aim of this study was to identify and re-present the experiences and views of a sample of children who have been 'missing' from education, and those of their parents/carers. Access to this hard to reach population has been possible as a result of an innovative interventionist tracking system, responding to pupil mobility, developed by the Education Authority in the fieldwork area. Semistructured interviews were conducted with parents/carers, children and young people with the aim of obtaining a demographic profile of families and eliciting a chronology of factors that participants saw as contributing to a child going missing from school systems. Three distinct life-course groups emerged from participants' accounts illustrating different degrees of disengagement from external systems. The authors conclude with a discussion of the different challenges each life-course group presents, for education policy and practice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

It is argued that the concept of ethos connects with Bourdieu's 'habitus' and the notion of situated learning. It can be argued that ethos can be defined as an organisation's habitus. An ecological perspective suggests that habituses external to the school provide dispositions that continuously construct and re-construct school ethos, and the evolving ethos itself provides developing dispositions and contexts for situated co-learning and participation in communities of practice; for example, shared learning about how to learn. Some implications for school improvement and leadership in schools are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article draws upon theories from a wide range of disciplines, including cultural studies and literary theory, to analyse representations of schooling in rock and pop songs. The songs selected cover a period from the beginning of rock 'n' roll in the 1950s, to Britpop and the present. It is argued that schooling is overwhelmingly represented as the antithesis of leisure and that in the 1960s conjuncture the representations of schooling became more and more critical. Even so, the resolution to the perceived oppression of schooling takes place at an imaginary level of fantasy. Other features of these representations are discussed, including the challenge provided in pop and rock songs to the notion of schools as spaces where relationships, romantic and/or sexual, do not take place. The way in which temporal aspects of schooling are represented and the division between clock time and time as experienced is discussed. The formal analysis is located within a larger project of ideology critique and its strengths and weaknesses are signalled. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article focuses on social inequalities in French secondary schools. The widening of educational opportunities in the decades following the second world war has been quite noteworthy in France. In the beginning of the 1950s only one-third of a generation entered secondary school. Nowadays, and since the 1975 Act, the entire generation is enrolled for 4 years in the same type of institution: in this unified type of junior secondary school, pupils are exposed to a common curriculum. One important question is whether this movement towards more and more common education has brought more equality in educational attainment. More recently, opening schools to more and more pupils has always been considered as the single best way to promote equalization of attainment between the social classes. At the present time, 20 years after the complete unification of the college, equal access and equal formal curriculum does not mean equal success. School careers are still marked by some degree of selection, and it is worth investigating the factors which prove relevant to explain this survival pattern. The article author has used the term "survival pattern" to indicate the successive shrinking of the student population through various steps and transitions.

We interviewed 28 parents who had at least one child who had finished compulsory schooling in the state sector We asked them about their choice of school and their experience of compulsory schooling for their child Discipline was a key element in their responses We analyzed the data to elucudate the different ways in which 'discipline' was of significance for these parents We examined why they talked about discipline in this way These included reference to employability a concern for the 'moral order ' and the maintenance of adult authority We attempted to understand what was being said by seeing it as embedded in their way of life Power relations between adult/child and resulting from social location were relevant to this understanding. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The changing forms and processes of social reproduction undertaken by Canada's elite independent schools are examined. Ideology, values, recruitment, and socialization processes and mechanisms in the member schools of the Canadian Association of Independent Schools are analysed. The focus is on reproduction theory (both the reproduction of the structure of classes and the intergenerational reproduction of families). The various forms of reproduction are examined in relation to class, ethnicity and gender. All have undergone considerable change; while the schools have remained critical agents for the reproduction of elites in Canadian society, the rise of meritocratic ideology and recruitment have had a paradoxical effect. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Since the appearance of Bowles & Gintis' (1976) 'correspondence thesis', neo-Marxist theorizing about educational change has gone in several directions. Different approaches have emphasized capitalist reproduction requirements, contradictions between these requirements and the democratic state, hegemony theory and processes of class formation. While studies with affinity to a Marxist problematic of subordination and oppression have become more theoretically open and empirically grounded, some of the core explanatory ideas of the historical materialist perspective tend to have been ignored or dismissed. In consequence, the main conceptual, empirical and theoretical limitations of the correspondence thesis are being repeated, notably in arguments about a 'post-Fordist' form of education. After a discussion of the contemporary relevance of historical materialism's core ideas for explaining educational change, the limited foci of neo-Marxist theories of education are critically reviewed. Some suggestions are then made for overcoming these persistent limitations--most notably a hyper-rationalistic image of education and a lack of direct attention to both production relations and educational relations per se. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Theories of organisation actually become ideologies, legitimisations for certain forms of organisation. They deploy arguments in terms of rationality and efficiency to provide control. The limits that they impose upon the conception of organisations actually close down the possibility of considering alternative forms of organisation. This is nowhere more clearly evident than in the current application of management theories to schools. Such theories marginalise empirical studies of school practice and dismiss the 'folk-knowledge' of teachers as irrelevant. They are as significant for what they exclude as for what they include (Ball, 1987, p. 5). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The events of the schools' boycott presented by Molteno are reviewed It is argued that for a combination of reasons illustrative of the difficulties deriving from the relationship between the social sciences and politics, his interpretation of the events must be seriously questioned The implication arising is that Molteno's linking of practice and theory is in this case not justified. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study explores the relationships between education and the economy. Briefly, the thesis proposes that economic growth and slowdown are associated with different educational experiences of groups of children, with particular types of experiences relating to relative power and the sense of justice held by more powerful individuals and groups. The thesis is explored in an examination of recent developments in Australian education. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]