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Foundational to Vygotsky's Zone of Proximal Development (ZPD) was the influence of Marx's theory of historical materialism. Vygotsky's work radically rejected the traditional approaches of developmental psychology. The ZPD centralized the importance of potential development not only by measuring or testing what a child could perform, but a tool to observe developmental change as a dialectical product of society and material life. In other words, social structures and the dynamic material world play a significant role in shaping the child's development. It follows then that contemporary uptakes of Vygotsky's ZPD likewise would be remiss to neglect the importance of historical materialism and take account of the dynamism of modern capital. This paper offers for further engagement the Zone of Proximal Privilege--a contemporary uptake of Vygotsky's work that explores the ways that the excesses of capital have created vast educational privileges for some while constricting access and development for many others.

This paper contributes to the discourse on the role of critical pedagogy in the U.S. education system. The paper is inspired by the story of a participant from a larger ongoing phenomenological study designed to explore the experience of immigrant teachers in the United States. The participant was selected because she gained prominence in the larger study as the only teacher who reported that because of the injustices she experienced (personally and vicariously) during her K-12 education, she was inspired to pursue teaching as a career. The participant is a Black female teacher who immigrated from England to the United States, and who has taught for approximately 30 years between both countries. Her experience as a student and her work as a teacher, are reflective of, and analyzed through the lens of critical pedagogy. The participant's experience was carefully and respectfully crafted into a profile that produced three major themes: (1) Racial injustice as an altruistic inspiration to becoming a teacher; (2) the work of the immigrant Teacher of Color in the United States necessarily involves actuating an inclusive and racial justice curricular agenda; and (3) what it means to be an immigrant Educator of Color in the United States is to conceptualize your practice as a deliberate political act that counteracts racial injustice and inequity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Inspired by the philosophies of Donna Haraway and Karen Barad, the aim of this paper is to stir up trouble and to double trouble time in education. We trouble how certain views of childhood shape our experience of school time and secondly, we trouble the way in which time as experienced in school, affects how adults relate to childhood. A particular relationship to and experience of time is nowadays prominently fostered and cultivated in educational institutions. We propose that 'time' and 'childhood' are intrinsically entangled concepts and logically connected, in the lived experience of educational contemporary institutions, with colonialism and capitalism. Decolonisation requires a troubling of the experience of time as it involves the subordination and denigration of children and childhood ('mysopedy'). We do this through a genealogy (a political reading of 'the' present) of the concepts time, childhood and school. Inspired by Karen Barad, we adopt Kyoko Hayashi's idea of 'travel hopping'. Travel hopping as methodology is a transindividual commitment to "undo" the injustices committed to those who are (also) no longer there (as well as our 'own' childhood 'selves'), without any pretense that the past can be made undone. Drawing on Barad's queer reading of Quantum Field Theory, we produce decolonising insights by diffractively tunneling through boundaries between human and nonhuman bodies in our writing, thereby unsettling the current relationship to time, the adult/child binary and adult temporality.

This conceptual and theoretical paper seeks to analyze the dynamics and consequences of psychologization and therapization, key mechanisms of the therapeutic turn in education. In particular, it focuses, on how the pathologization of social problems occasions individualization and the production of self-reliant and inward-looking subjects trained to maximize human capital according to the tenets of neoliberalism. Second, it explains the principles of a critical approach to education that is informed by the concept of intersectionality. It shows how this concept might be helpful in interrogating and addressing structurally embedded inequalities and injustices. Informed by the insights of Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw, this approach engenders a contextualized and nuanced analysis of social forces, social identities, and ideological instruments through which power and disadvantage are expressed and legitimized. To further illustrate its importance, insurgent citizenship education, a concept drawn from the experiences of a Philippine school for displaced indigenous groups will be discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper extends Critical Race Feminista Methodological (CRFM) approaches by contending that convivencias− the coexistence necessary for creating relationships in the field − are an integral part of engaging research collaborators within educational historical research. Drawing on oral histories with Chicana/o librarians, personal collections, and archival sources, I outline the convivencias I shared with librarians that span across spatial and temporal dimensions. These interactions were centered on recollecting, remembering, and learning about the activism within Latina/o/x chidlren's literture and librarianship's history. Convivencias across space were possible through diverse interactions, such as in-person meetings, phone conversations, video conferences, and emails. Convivencias across time are represented by the continuity of sustained efforts to advance social justice in librarianship across multiple decades. The conceptualization of convivencias across space and time emerged as a CRFM tool that aims to center seldomly documented narratives of activism essential for fostering connections, cultivating community memories, and nuancing historical educational research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Utilizing Yoon's whiteness-at-work framework, the purpose of this paper is to articulate critical whiteness and anti-racist pedagogical approaches for educators. We specifically offer practical strategies, to be taken up discretely or together, in an effort to disrupt white hegemony, to which the American educational system is seemingly beholden. Currently, the teaching profession, writ large, is predominantly white, and within K-12 the teaching force is mostly (79%) White women, conceivably yielding a number of implications. Hence, it is our hope, that by adopting some or all of these recommendations, educators would begin to improve learning conditions, bolster the effectiveness of long standing culturally-based pedagogies, and strengthen justice efforts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As an Aboriginal woman critiquing Australia's education system as a site of ongoing colonialism, I aim to actively resist the temptation to perform research within Western hegemonic research paradigms, and instead seek ways to disrupt normative research practices with the what, how, and why of research. In this paper, I utilise Indigenous autoethnography as a cultural imperative to 'walk my talk', embedding an autoethnographic dataset of reflection, poetry, emotion, and subjective blurting in response to my experiences of colonialism in the academy. Indigenous autoethnography allows a space from which I can expose (and resist) the abnormality of the 'normal'; fulfil cultural, ethical and relational obligations; and recentre axiology and ontology as a starting place for research. This paper seeks to contribute to the small but growing literature on Indigenous autoethnography, to offer another pathway for Indigenous scholars to follow, as well as illuminate normative research practices for non-Indigenous researchers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Queer Black joy is the grand ridiculer creating possibilities for organisms to collaborate, fracture, rock with, and throw shade. In this paper, the collective analytical frameworks of racial and Queer battle fatigue are brought together to consider the implications for Queer Black communities in light of the simultaneous disparagements created through normalized violent collectives of heteronormative, cisgender White supremacist ideologies. As exemplars of Queer Black joy, an analysis of the embodiments and music from disco innovator Sylvester and New Orleans bounce artist and "Queen Diva" Big Freedia are examined to consider the ways in which they enacted Queer Black joy in the public sphere, simultaneously in connection with the witnessing ways in which their Black Queer joy was and is attacked. In conclusion, Black Queer joy is situated as an enlivenment to embolden qualitative research lenses in the equity imagining/building project for the overall eradication racial and Queer battle fatigue. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Informed largely by Affect theory (2004), this paper takes up ‘reflexivities of discomfort’ to reflexively engage with my affective struggles as a Christian, heterosexual, mother, educator, undertaking a study on homosexuality, which is a thorny issue in Uganda. It a methodological prologue, reflecting my thoughts and struggles before I undertake the study. My purpose is not to find solutions, but to lay bare some anxieties and ambivalences, also suggesting the limits of reflexivity. The paper begins with an autobiographical narrative about school in relation to (homo)sexuality. This is followed by an exposition of Uganda’s Anti-homosexuality Bill; my use of reflexivity and affect to inform my affective struggles; my background as it relates to sexuality, providing insights into my researcher positionality. I then engage with moments imbued with high affective/emotive intensity in my preparation to undertake the study. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper uses the Free Compulsory Universal Basic Education (fCUBE) policy implementation in Ghana as an exemplar to explore the apparent disjuncture between policy intentions in theory and outcomes of implementation tasks in practice. Through the critical discourse analysis of a range of policy documents complemented by the analysis of interviews with Ghanaian education officials, the paper investigates the extent to which the ‘free’, ‘compulsory’, ‘universal’ and ‘basic education’ components claimed in the fCUBE policy title are reflected in the implementation process. Owing to its commitment to enhancing the educational opportunities and outcomes of the educationally disadvantaged, the fCUBE policy is viewed as a ‘rights-based policy’ deeply rooted in social democratic values. However, the advent of neo-liberal ideological rhetoric of ‘skills for the world of work’ has triggered the neutralisation of these progressive ideals. This, the paper argues, has led to a significant discursive shift in policy direction and language of implementing the policy. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper makes the argument that new global spatialities and new governance structures in education have important implications for how we think about education policy and do education policy analysis. This context necessitates that researchers engage in new methodologies to ensure that there is a suitable link between their research problem and the methods utilised for its investigation. To this end, I suggest that network ethnography can be conceived as a ‘threshold’ methodology; a new way of looking at social relations in changing times with attendant methodological benefits and shortcomings.Here I constitute the network ethnographer ascyberflâneur, who, like the nineteenth-centuryflâneuris lured by and attentive to the ‘new’, where they embrace the convergence of space and new technologies to become a well-positioned observer of contemporary policy processes. In focusing on thecyberflâneur,this paper aims to provoke debate amongst policy sociology researchers about how we can reflect on and modify our practice to ensure we are contributing to meaningful research in the twenty-first century. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper is a part of a three-year study, ‘Internationalisation and reform of secondary schooling in Kazakhstan’, jointly conducted by an international team of UK- and Kazakhstan-based researchers in 2012–2014. The study was conceived as a mechanism to support education reform in the country. This was achieved through reconstructing the education policy narrative of the last two decades and understanding the effects of the newly established Nazarbayev Intellectual Schools and the Centres of Excellence in-service professional development programme on the larger system. While the focus of the study was on Kazakhstan’s educational present, the references to the previous system of education, which was often referred to asSoviet,traditional, but alsosuccessful, fundamentalandthe best in the world, were numerous. These continuous references to the past prompted the authors of this paper to address the questions:What memories and practices of Soviet education are still dominant in the field of education in Kazakhstan? How do these beliefs continue to shape educational debate in the country?In support of its argument, the paper draws on the literature on Soviet schooling and contemporary education reform, interview data with national and international teachers in Kazakhstan, and field observations. The resultant narrative, which brings together the analysis of educational change and changes in teachers’ beliefs, may appeal to many involved in the construction of the contemporary reform agenda. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The paper privileges thevoicesof British social anthropologists examining their perceptions of how their research expertise was acquired. Reference is made to the case of education research in Britain, which, by comparison with social anthropology, reveals limited capacity as measured through performance audits of scientific research quality. The paper endeavours to facilitateknowledge transferby uncovering and theoretically classifying the origins of research capacity. Life history interviews provide the data which illuminate the grounded nature of symbolic capital. The intellectual formation of the sample is characterised through Pierre Bourdieu’s theorisation of symbolic capital. The results indicate that research capacity can be characterised in terms of a transmission of symbolic capital, including that gained in the field through institutional affiliations whose reputational assets enhance the power of academics to play the game. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper, which is exploratory in nature, uses the ideas of Bernstein and Bourdieu on class and culture to make sense of children's difficulties with "realistic" mathematics test items. In particular, it suggests that the use of such test items may discriminate against working-class testees as a consequence of these children's tendency to interpret formal educational contexts as legitimate arenas for the employment of everyday knowledge when such use is actually "inappropriate." The paper's exploratory nature is reflected in its structure. Rather than beginning with a presentation of the relevant theoretical ideas, the paper intersperses these with the presentation of data in the form of transcripts from interviews during which children attempted test items. This structure reflects better the process by which the working model of the relation between culture and assessment presented in the paper was developed. An introductory discussion of the curriculum and assessment policy context in England is followed by a discussion of data and theoretical ideas during which Bernstein's concepts of recognition and realisation rules and aspects of Bourdieu's accounts of habitus are set against children's interpretations of items. This discussion leads to the presentation of the model. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores the tensions and complexities for two principals as they work towards equity and improved social and educational outcomes for their Indigenous students. Drawing on Foucault’s fourfold ethical frame and poststructuralist notions of the subject, this paper presents the different ways the white female principals of Indigenous schools are formed as subjects. We illustrate how the multiplicities of their subject formation are influenced by the historicity and contextual factors of the schools and communities. These factors play a significant part in how these principals work as advocates and differently experience and negotiate the tensions around representation of and for Indigenous schools and communities. In realising equity goals for Indigenous students, the paper draws on Foucault’s work to illustrate the imperative of school leaders’ cognisance of, and capacity to work with, these factors. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The following paper is a critical examination involving the misuse of sacred cultural tools and practices in the name of multicultural education. Native American practices are identified to illustrate how such inappropriate usages promote pedagogical racism. The misuse continues the hegemonic distribution of social capital. Through the irresponsible portrayal of complex and sophisticated cultures, American education continues to perpetuate pedagogical violence against children who are already socially and educationally disenfranchised. Using Freire, Giroux, Deloria, and Grande, this paper will identify strategies of communication and education necessary to eliminate pedagogical racism and begin to reverse the violence against children. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Narratives are important to us not only or even primarily because they tell about our past lives, but because they enable us to make sense of the present. We attempt to create coherence and give meaning to our lives by learning to read time backwards. This paper examines a counter narrative of entry into the teaching profession showing how the construction of one teacher's identity is presented as a biographical narrative that he assumes to be at odds with an 'orthodox' narrative of becoming a teacher. The paper offers an interpretation of the personal narrative, told as counter to an assumed 'orthodox' story of entry into teaching. It also examines the relationship between the personal narrative and the contested site of the master narrative and its counter as the point at which the individual both positions themselves and is positioned within the discourse of teaching. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

There is currently strong interest among policy‐makers internationally in the idea of transformative learning, and considerable evidence that existing educational institutions are not equipped to provide this kind of learning experience for young people. Definitions of transformative learning are problematic, however, and few take full account of the radical sociocultural changes resulting from the introduction of digital technologies such as the Internet, wireless connectivity and digital imaging. This paper derives from research carried out collaboratively between university‐based researchers, teachers and students in four schools, spanning the age range 8–16. A working definition of transformative learning is the starting point for an investigation into new ways of planning learning events using a generic pedagogic framework derived from activity theory. The paper explores the implications of the outcomes of this empirical work, and develops a theory of transformative learning, grounded in sociocultural theories including the work of Turkle, McLuhan and Wartofsky. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The focus for this paper evolved out of doctoral research conducted by the author with incarcerated women attending a prison school. During that project, she hired an assistant to transcribe audiotapes of interviews, participant observations, and field notes. In this paper, one context-specific case is used to examine the complexities of transcription work involving a person other than the researcher. Lave and Wenger's (1991) "legitimate peripheral participation" serves as an analytical framework to explore the learning experienced by both researcher and transcriber as a result of their co-participation in the project. Transcripts of four interviews conducted with the transcriber provide the basis for the investigation. The findings disrupt simplistic notions of the transcription process and show how peripheral participation can lead to educational experiences for those involved. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores the connections a young man with autism spectrum (AS) made using cyborg imagery having attended school in Nova Scotia, Canada. Cyborg is applied as a conceptual approach to explore the young man’s connections to human and nonhuman elements. We also make use of rhizomes as a methodological framework to support the exploration of the young man’s multiplicity of experiences with cyborg configurations. Data are drawn from a semi-structured interview with the young man where he demonstrated his capacity to employ cyborg imagery as a means to rearticulate his social identity when experiencing school on the periphery. A diffractive reading of the data produced alternative understandings outside contemporary thought on his schooling experiences. Findings challenge educators in applying cyborg to cut across static social categories and theorize new social knowledge on the experiences of students with AS. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article conceptualizes "possibilities" as a challenge to the ways that Black boys are constructed and arrested through their engagement in educational spaces. Critical race scholars have deployed counter-stories to disrupt deficit framing of Black boys by discussing their possibilities, promise, and potential. Similarly, we weave these insights and analyses of Black boys' lives to identify how multiple possibilities contribute to Black boys' thriving in education. The seven dimensions of the Possibilities Framework include dreaming (related to aspirations and fantasy), caring (e.g., cared for and cared about), belonging (related to mattering and feeling connected), enjoying (related to joy), agency (their actions and autonomy), protecting (feeling safe), and affirming (related to being valued). Each of these dimensions can inform pedagogy and praxis and empower Black boys and young men in educational settings. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper draws on research conducted with schools located within the Johannesburg area of the Gauteng province in South Africa. The findings of two research projects are analyzed in relation to discourses of school effectiveness. The first project was the School Effectiveness in South Africa project (SESA) initiated by Advancing Basic Education and Literacy and some members of the Education Department of the University of the Witwatersrand in 1992. The second project upon which this paper draws is one that was initiated by the Gauteng education Minister, Mrs. Mary Metcalfe,via the establishmentof a Committee for the Culture of Learning and Teaching in 1995. Despite the many differences that characterized these two projects, they both point importantly to ways in which black schooling in South Africa is occurring. They provide empirical evidence of the kinds of forces with which schools contend daily, the nature of actors involved within them, and the differences and similarities among them. We do not, however, claim that the cases we cite are generalizable to all South African schools. We do maintain, however, that the experiences documented in this paper offer us valuable insightsinto the micro-level realities of schools that are consciously and continuously working towards improvements in their educational practices. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article presents the work and reflections of two researchers who are searching for models that work for Black children and communities. The present study focuses on their work with the Maroons. Maroons are those African descendants whose ancestors escaped from enslavement and created villages that were hidden away in densely forested regions. This paper unveils the authors' research work among the Maroons as they sought to educe important cultural knowledge that may have utility for Black children and communities worldwide. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper reports from a case study of a ‘talent class’, a special development programme for talented pupils, established in a Danish municipality. It analyses student backgrounds and motives for joining this talent class programme, which is seen in relation to ordinary schooling in Denmark. Drawing on Bourdieu, the paper links social background resources and success in school via the concepts of habitus and capital; it views talent as the product of an investment of time and cultural capital, which is easily accumulated by children of resourceful families. Based on the analysis and its discussion of school talent, the paper proposes a typology of talented students, encompassing the distinguished, the quiet, the versatile and the industrious students. For each type of talent, a student narrative illustrates the link between social backgrounds and student approaches and understandings of their own talents. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The racialized body is of obvious, or at least implicit, concern for the qualitative study of Whiteness in education. Whiteness, as an organizing principle that conditions normative ways of being in society, is predicated upon the raced body as a social signifier. It is curious then, that the body remains under-examined and not treated as a serious analytic. How bodies interact in real time—how educational spaces are brought to life—are left to the analytical wayside in favor of reflective approaches. This paper questions prominent approaches to studying Whiteness in education, and subsequently proposes expanding the methodological repertoire to encompass a phenomenology of racial embodiment as a way to make-meaning of the subtle interactions between bodies unfolding in unique educational places. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In recent years, the Secretariat of Public Education in Mexico has supplied a significant number of schools with computers and connectivity, putting important resources into the purchase and installation of equipment. It is assumed that teachers will somehow naturally transition to using these tools and in fact, new curricular guidelines derived from international policy put them under a great deal of pressure to do so. This paper presents an up-close, qualitative look at one teacher’s efforts for incorporating technology into her history class and her process of constructing a working knowledge of using the computer, searching for ideas and materials on the Internet, and creating activities for her students. Equally important for incorporating technology into her teaching were the institutional and technical obstacles such as obsolete technology, insufficient connectivity, and school site constraints she confronted. Her case illustrates the complexity of using computer and Internet technologies in classroom settings. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Even in marginalized towns it is possible to find school communities that have developed relationships that encourage the construction of institutional cultures and management structures prone to superior academic performance compared to others within the same context. This paper presents the findings of a qualitative research project conducted in 8 towns and 16 schools in Mexico. The analytical framework is based on Kenneth Gergen’s social constructionism. The paper highlights the role of the school’s principal in the construction of relationships in the school community and the build-up of practices leading to shared meaning and goals. The desire and ability of the principal to promote dialogue and provide spaces for it are central, as well as her or his ability to interpret and translate the needs of parents and community, and the systemic norms from the Ministry of Education, to the reality of the community and the parents. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Using the unique form of a composite counterstory culled from the experiences of 13 Black women at historically and predominantly White colleges and universities in a Western U.S. state, this paper explores the psychological tensions and silencing Black college women face as they navigate social constructions of their selfhood under a White gaze. This study centers these Black women’s voices through a tradition of storytelling and examines the ways they try to carve their own place by often engaging liberating, yet repressive, historically constructed STRONGBLACKWOMAN imagery to counteract equally silencing Angry Black Woman imagery. The historically and predominantly White institutional spaces within which these women study, live, and play exacerbate this tension, propelling them to model and rely upon stereotypically ‘positive’ representations of Black womanhood to deal with the pain of microaggressions. Altogether, these factors create instances of enhanced racial battle fatigue. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article reports on the development of a new culturally sensitive approach to collecting group discussion data in the Pacific: veivosaki-yaga. The new approach was developed during a project on Technical and Vocational Education (TVET) in multicultural Fiji. One challenge was to gain understanding from villages of parental attitudes towards TVET. While focus groups proved to answer the purpose for Indian Fijian parents, they were deemed culturally inappropriate for Indigenous Fijian parents. As a ‘de-colonising’ Pacific methodology, veivosaki-yaga was judged to offer a culturally appropriate framework. Arising from strategic communication conventions in Indigenous Fijian culture, veivosaki-yaga means ‘worthwhile discussion’ - of serious topics. It differs from the now well-known Pacific methodology approach of talanoa, which is based on much more informal and free-flowing discussion. This paper does not engage the findings of the original project as such, but seeks to convey the value of a culturally appropriate methodological approach devised therein. It contributes to the currently evolving literature on Pacific methodologies in the field of qualitative educational research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper discusses the results of an action-research project developed in a federation of Parents Associations (PAs) in Catalonia, aimed at helping PAs involve immigrant families. First, I nuance the idea of participation in schools to highlight some of the problems associated with participative initiatives targeting ‘hard to reach’ parents. Then, I borrow the notion of Intermediary Organizations (IOs) to assess in what ways PAs may be able to become a valuable resource to help schools involve immigrant parents. In this regard, I analyse the situation of Pas located in multicultural contexts. Then, three specific PA projects are discussed to illustrate PA’s strengths and weaknesses when leading their own projects. In conclusion, I argue that, in order to work as truly IOs, PAs must: (a) build on the experiences of successful PAs leading projects; (b) strengthen their organizational closure; and (c) lessen their responsibility to carry on important school services. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper notes that there has been a relatively recent revision of the pragmatist philosophy canon, one that moves beyond a focus on epistemic and pedagogical theories, and locates pragmatism in a tradition of radical ontological theorizing and political action. This essay examines this revision for its relevance to the emerging materialist turn in qualitative research methodology. The essay focuses on two themes within contemporary and classical pragmatist philosophy: a reflexive realism and an ontology of the future. The methodological implications of these features are explored in detail. These implications are compared to post-structuralist conceptions of reflexivity that informed the last wave of qualitative research innovation and to the new materialism theories that are inspiring a new wave of methodological innovation. The most significant methodological implications of pragmatic philosophy are located in its ideas about the ontologically co-constituting relationship between inquiry practice and future possibilities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper scrutinizes a rare methodological moment when I found myself, an unseasoned black woman scholar, researching the lives of three white women. In this reflective process, I make a single point: that the locution of race is limiting if it persists in being a point of struggle for marginalized scholars. In so doing, I distinguish between race as the site of intellectual engagement and race as a point from which to engage in scholarship. I begin with a brief explanation of how I came to take the decision to research three white women and of (dis)locating myself as other to the respondents. I then examine my actions in the context of concerns raised by other black scholars in their engagement with the academic establishment. Finally, I draw on the works of feminist scholars and argue that politicized and strategic understandings of otherness can potentially create challenging means for intellectual activism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In recent years, therapeutic techniques have played an increasingly significant role in Danish educational thinking. One way in which this therapeutic thinking discloses itself is in the ever-growing use of educational-therapeutic games as part of the educational practice. Inspired by Foucault, we argue that educational-therapeutic games can be understood as a kind of confessional practice that introduces a pastoral power relationship between pupils and teachers. This paper offers an empirically based analysis of one of the frequently used therapeutic-educational games in Denmark, called 'The Good Chair'. In general, the technique of 'The Good Chair' establishes a type of interaction that is characterized by a sense of togetherness, intimacy, and an instrumentality-problem orientation. The structure and regulation of the game cast the child as a psychological being by uncovering the child's true inner nature. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

William Tate proposed that critical race scholars in education look to moral and spiritual texts to unpack and interrogate the workings of race and other forms of marginalization in schools. While Tate did not offer the ways in which this vision is manifest, the participants in this study situated themselves within a religio-spiritual worldview through which they sought social justice in schools. The authors in this paper highlight a theoretical framework by an inclusive reading of Critical Race Theory as 'ordinary theology' to explore how Black female principals interrogate gendered and raced practices and promote social justice in schools. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Visual methods are often marginalised in educational research and have not been employed to collect information about sexuality at school. This paper examines the viability and effectiveness of conducting research about the 'sexual cultures' of schools in New Zealand using photo-diaries and photo-elicitation. 'Effectiveness' is judged by what the visual methodologies literature purports are the benefits of these methods. These advantages include providing participants with greater autonomy over what and how data is collected. The paper argues it is feasible to employ visual methods to research sexuality in schools. Such methods offer participants alternative means of recounting their stories, can help illuminate an esoteric object of investigation like 'sexual cultures' and engage participants less likely to volunteer for sexuality research. The use of visual methods is not without challenges however. Securing ethics approval and school participation along with problems with camera retrieval and protecting participant agency were some difficulties encountered in the current study. For those wishing to pursue less conventional research methodologies in educational settings, this discussion highlights potential benefits and struggles. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents the author's comments on an article of Ruth Woods, an author, regarding primary schools in London, England. The author states that the Wood's paper was thought provoking, however, his analysis is predominantly located in an understanding and positioning of Zak, a 9-year-old Somalian boy, at an individual level. She states that Wood's analysis lacks the intersected complexities of race, gender and social class.

Educational discourse in Australia has been dramatically altered in recent decades as neoliberal choice policies favouring an increasingly marketized, tiered educational landscape have witnessed a burgeoning of private sector schooling. In this climate, many perceive private sector schooling as providing moral, social and academic benefits beyond those available to students in the public sector. Amid rhetorics of excellence and accountability that pervade discourses of private schooling, however, recent high-profile incidents of violence involving students at elite private schools provide a powerful provocation to these dominant discourses, and call into question a range of cultural practices associated with elite schooling. In this paper, the author draws on data generated from a three-year study of sexually violent incidents that took place at an elite boys' school in Sydney, Australia and their representation in the public domain, to consider how discourses of elitism, heteronormativity and violence circulate in dialogue. Through analysis of school- and media-generated texts, and interviews with a former student and parents of the school, it is argued that the education marketplace is a site of disjuncture and contradiction, in which the privileges of private school consumption are simultaneously upheld and revoked in a complex interplay of school, media and social discourse. In so doing, the author considers how a range of cultural and institutional practices are complicit in the production of violence. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Although theories on anti‐oppressive education abound, few scholars have conducted empirical studies of anti‐oppressive educational curricula to test the alignment of theories—constructed largely by university scholars—and practices carried out by K–12 educators and students. While feminist poststructuralist theorists have critiqued critical pedagogy and multicultural scholars for not interrogating their universalist claims and for overemphasizing rationalist discourses, many of their calls for situated, performative pedagogy remain abstract. The following paper attempts to make some of the conceptualizations of social justice education concrete by examining student responses to two experiential activities in a high school leadership program. Comprising students from eight high schools located in a single metropolitan area, this program sought to increase student consciousness of the pervasive prejudice and discrimination in US society and, subsequently, to move these students to action. This paper analyzes the student interpretations of two awareness‐raising activities at the program’s leadership camp to argue that on‐the‐ground anti‐oppressive educational endeavors require significant time, commitment and organizational structures as well as the integration of poststructuralist, critical, multicultural and feminist ideas. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The state of qualitative research in education is addressed in this paper in terms of three categories of scientific inquiry (following Heap, 1992) and the varying place and function of qualitative work in each of these categories. The argument is put that one of these categories of inquiry, specifically cultural human sciences, offers the educational enterprise distinctive theoretical and analytic advantages not shared by the others. An illustration is provided concerning an issue that is both central and particular to educational research: the intertwining of intellectual, curricular, social and moral work accomplished routinely in classrooms. The paper concludes that empirically rich, programmatic and explicitly theorized research continues to hold most promise for the confident and sustained progression of qualitative traditions in education. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper affirms the power and potential in the turn to narrative for research into teachers' careers but explores a methodological limitation within this move that may have narrowed the repertoire of plot structures used to construct teachers' career stories. It considers a variant methodological orientation for the representation of career narratives. This orientation is grounded in an assumption that teacher career stories do not necessarily pursue a narrative chronology, where stories possess an obvious beginning, middle and end. The paper presents a 'career portrait'-an ethnographic sketch of a teacher's career-so as to indicate something of the data that might be generated when a less teleological narrative research frame is used for the study of teachers' careers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper the author focuses on the processes of writing involved in using poststructuralist theory to analyse her work at a school for students categorized as 'emotionally/behaviourally disordered'. While the work at the school is the crucial material for this exploration, the author turns her gaze on the detail of writing about this work beginning with the diary/notes she wrote on the detail of their daily lives at the school. She examines how, in the process of this writing, she begins to unfold the loops of reflexivity between the reading, the doing, the thinking, and the writing of a particular piece of poststructuralist work. She explores how binaries such as theory/practice, thought/word, and public/private were played out in writing about her work and makes more visible the ways writing and publishing worked to constitute both herself and the writing in powerful ways. She also explores the dangers and possibilities of working and writing differently at the margins and the ways formal academic writing came to constitute her differently—looping from one who was seen as an expert in the dominant discourses to one who was doing quirky work and back to one who was an expert. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The aim of this article is to call for qualitative researchers in education and other human sciences to grapple with recent developments in trauma studies and engage in reconceptualizing their research practices so that they pay attention to the catastrophic effects of colonialism on individuals and communities. Joining other critics who have called for decolonizing trauma studies, I turn to decolonial and postcolonial perspectives to reorient qualitative research practices for the collection and analysis of trauma narratives and suggest a decolonial understanding of trauma in education. In particular, I draw on literature from decolonizing trauma studies to propose two decolonial research orientations for qualitative researchers: (1) Acknowledging the problems of Eurocentric approaches to trauma in education; (2) reinventing research practices that are delinked from Western frameworks of understanding trauma, while embracing "other(ed)" ways of doing research on trauma. Specific examples are provided to show how researchers might advance these orientations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This is an exploration of methodological debates related to ethnographic research. Reflection on conducting research on school choice in an Australian regional centre is the beginning point for a discussion of what Appadurai describes as a dialectical relationship between the neighbourhood and its capacity to exist and reshape itself in relation to outside forces. The place of the researcher is considered in relation to a regional context and the possibility that within such a context, the urban researcher could be a ‘stranger’. The notion of the ‘strange’ researcher is used to explore belonging and through it, geographic imaginaries of regionality. The case is made that the production of locality in this region contributed to a researcher ‘lock out’ because local knowledge about school choice was being unsettled. The paper takes up the question of how research in a region can contribute to understandings of ethnographic research as unbounded. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Studies of elites and elite education have largely not involved rigorous debate, either with regard to the conceptual resources deployed or methodologies adopted. Even the concepts elite and elite schools have not been problematized much. Further, there is a tendency for people to cite, rather than engage or dispute each other. So while the number of published studies increases and the field grows in size, and expands in focus, it is not necessarily growing through spirited dialog and critique. The first part of this paper considers the ways in which the methodological scope in the study of elites and elite education has been restrained and limited through the repetition of particular methodological frameworks and practices. Drawing on the work included in this special issue and other recent research, we then suggest some methodological possibilities for expanding this scope. In the second main part, we offer some provocations about the theoretical resources that are conventionally deployed. We argue that scholars need to be much more critically self-conscious about their uses of elite theories and class theories and much more aware of the ideological implications of their research. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In this paper, we demonstrate how history informs how policy meanings are constructed and the rhetorical strategies used to convince others to accept these meanings. We have two goals: (a) to show how a group of non-governmental actors, People for Education, became part of Ontario, Canada’s policy discursive network; and (b) to demonstrate the utility of constructing cultural and microhistories in critical policy analysis. This article is important because it describes resistance from a critical perspective and offers a methodology for producing histories of struggles over meaning-making in educational politics. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper explores the difficulties that novice teachers confront at two economically, socially, and academically disadvantaged schools in the state of Nuevo Leon, Mexico. The researchers employed the action research tradition. Problems were identified using participant observation during reflexive workshops conducted with novice teachers and also in school settings. Teacher-generated written documents during the workshops were also analyzed. The difficulties these teachers face include issues related to parent involvement, resources, students’ basic learning background, teaching strategies for students with particular needs, discipline, work overload, and career preparation and curricular reform. The identified challenges are similar to those that beginning teachers typically experience. However, results of this study highlight the ways in which the immediate working context and characteristics of Mexico’s educational system uniquely impact and structure the experience of novice teachers in disadvantaged schools. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Drawing on empirical data from two ethnographic studies on familial im/migration and education on both sides of the Mexico–U.S. border, in this article, we focus on critical incidents that resulted in listening realignment during data collection in which children deploy their politicized funds of knowledge (PFOK) (Gallo & Link) to shape the form and content of our research. We argue that as researchers in educational settings we must reflect on these exceptional moments and reframe our methods of talking with im/migrant children to engage with their politicized funds of knowledge. This entails following children's leads as the experts of their lives while opening up spaces for their PFOK, including their range of narrative approaches that we may inadvertently discount. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article documents the process I, as a teacher educator at UCLA's History Geography Project, went through to develop my lesson for centering Salvi history, "Reclaiming Our Stories Con Pláticas y Fotos: Pláticas as Pedagogy In K-12 History Classrooms." Inspired by the scholarship of feminist women of color who have shaped and informed my teaching practice and my views on the purpose of history education, I make the case for why Salvi communities in Los Angeles need a lesson like this to intervene in the erasures of Salvi communities in the history-social science framework for California public schools. These overt silences that I, and an entire generation of Salvi students, have faced at home and in school motivated this lesson, in which I use pláticas as pedagogy in an effort to move towards healing in our community. Specifically, I narrate how my lesson draws on the five principles outlined in the Chicana/Latina feminist plática methodology as well as the ways my lesson aimed to meet the specific needs of my Salvi community and history instruction. I conclude by reflecting on how I made this lesson accessible to educators through various professional developments and reflect on the process of working with educators. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this manuscript, we argue that the increasing use of reductive tools born out of neoliberal reforms in education, such as The Framework for Teaching, a tool for teacher evaluation credited to Charlotte Danielson, limits the possibilities for emergent, improvisational teaching. We consider the broader political landscape of the last 25 years to suggest that The Framework for Teaching illuminates a preoccupation in education with so-called measurable results in ways that hurt teachers while advancing political agendas and profiting private corporations. Next, we rely on storytelling methodology to critique the framework and offer alternative ways of thinking about teacher evaluation. Ultimately, our critique intends to prompt more humane understandings of teacher evaluation, thereby permitting and engendering improvisational pedagogies., [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article takes up the questions: How does Whiteness affect conceptions of Culturally Sustaining Pedagogies (CSP)? Specifically, when it comes to Whiteness, is there a culture worth sustaining? To begin this examination, we first outline what CSP and Whiteness are. Second, we review the literature within Critical Whiteness Studies (CWS) that takes up pedagogical questions. Third, we theorize the tensions and places of overlap across CSP and CWS—specifically that when it comes to Whiteness there is not a culture worth sustaining, but there is space for White people within CSP as long as they take account of Whiteness. Fourth, we propose a framework for merging CSP and CWS, W.A.A.C.K. C.S.P. (White folks Applying Anti-Racist Cultural Knowledge for Culturally Sustaining Pedagogies). We conclude with implications of this framework for future educational research and practical implications for White teachers and White students. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]