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I have had a close and long-standing relationship with the IOE (Institute of Education), UCL's Faculty of Education and Society (University College London, UK). In order to understand why and how for many years the IOE became my 'second home', I infuse this article with a combination of critical academic and political points and a detailed sense of personal history. In the process, I trace out the development of a number of my arguments about the relationship between knowledge, power and education. I connect this to the role of the IOE in this development, both as an institution and with regard to people with whom I had close contacts over the years. Among the people I particularly focus on is Geoff Whitty, who was a key figure in all of this.

In an earlier essay in the Reviewing Policy section of this journal, I examined many of the major arguments for social justice teacher unionism. This combines both more traditional union concerns over wages, working conditions, professional autonomy, and respect with a much more concerted focus by unions on social justice issues in schools, communities, and the larger society. The importance of such a commitment and what it actually looks like is evident in the book under discussion here. "Teacher Unions and Social Justice" is one of a deservedly well-respected and growing series of volumes published by Rethinking Schools. The entire series constitutes substantive contributions to some of the most significant and contentious issues facing deeply committed educators. Through books such as "Teacher Unions and Social Justice" and other important publications, Rethinking Schools provides us with ways of combining the professional, political, and personal aspects of our lives and of coming together to build thicker forms of critically democratic education to defend a more robust vision of the common good.

Almost all of the discussions surrounding educational policy focus their attention on particular places, especially various kinds of formal schooling. While this focus is of course crucial, it tends to ignore other educational sites where acts of teaching go on and where challenges to accepted understandings are waged. These include libraries and the topic of this essay, museums. "Creating the Creation Museum" clearly documents why such sites are worthy of our most serious attention. The book is a substantive contribution in a number of ways. It offers important critical insights about the Museum and its overt role in "advancing a long standing movement goal: advancing the cultural authority of creation science." It also provides us with an expanded set of methodological tools for engaging in such work.

This paper is one of two which bring together leading educational researchers to consider some of the key challenges facing democracy and education during the twenty-first century, including rising social and economic inequality, political instability, and the existential threats of global pandemics and climate change. In this paper, key educational scholar-activists respond to the challenges and possibilities for democracy and education, with consideration of the importance of reimagining education as being for democracy. The questions asked in this paper have particular salience for educational leaders, who must be at the centre of any commitment to democratic education.

This article examines a new trend of high school choice in China – parental choice of emerging international high-school curriculum programs (IHSCPs) recently established by Chinese elite public high schools. We add to the existing critical literature on school choice by providing a detailed empirical analysis of why, how, and under what conditions Chinese parents with high socio-economic status choose a particular IHSCP. Drawing on Pierre Bourdieu's conceptual triad of practice – capital, habitus, and field, the article points out that Chinese upper-middle- and upper-class parents engage in complicated conversion strategies surrounding their individual and collective struggles for elite education in both national and international fields of power. The study foregrounds the role of neoliberalism in articulating local and global education markets that allows privileged Chinese to transcend structural constraints in China and seek out opportunities in the international education field for their children. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The special issue documents the conceptual, empirical, and political progress that critical policy analysis in education has made. The contributions build on and employ the tools that have already been established, while they represent new critical approaches and combinations, each of which provides paths to be developed even further. I discuss the gains, limits, and paths to take to strengthen these analyses. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In education, the areas of critical policy studies, critical cultural studies, and critical curriculum studies all owe a good deal to a number of people. Among them are Paulo Freire, Raymond Williams, Pierre Bourdieu, Basil Bernstein, and Antonio Gramsci. Yet no such listing would be complete without the inclusion of Stuart Hall. The two books I discuss in this essay provide us with important parts of the reasons many people continue to find in his work--and his life--the kinds of analyses and commitments that point their own work in more substantive, nuanced, and satisfying directions. In many ways, his writings and his life provide a model for what I have called the critical scholar/activist in education. [An Essay Review of Stuart Hall, "Cultural Studies 1983: A Theoretical History." Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2016. pp. 218. Paper. ISBN 9780822362630 and Stuart Hall, with Bill Schwarz, "Familiar Stranger: A Life Between Two Islands." Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2017. pp. 302. Hardcover. ISBN 9780822363873.]

Books for and in schools are commodities. They form a central part of the political economy of publishing. They are also, profoundly, sites of cultural and ideological conflict. While always there, there are periods when these economic and ideological conflicts are even more powerful. This is just such a time. This reality asks us to also examine places in school buildings that might (often wrongly) seem to some people to be "less important." Among these places is the school library as a resource, a teaching device, an access point to things seen as controversial, a mirror of conflicts and economic and political transformations, and for many students, at times a sanctuary. American Public School Librarianship: A History provides us with a richly sourced account of the development of a key pedagogic site in schools and of many of the personal, institutional, and political reasons why they do—and do not do—certain things. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article, I share a number of thoughts and concerns about the current and future status of a field in which I have been a participant for five decades. I know that many others share these worries as well. Speaking honestly, I am deeply concerned that too much of the field of curriculum has lost its way. Too much of it is characterized by a condition of historical amnesia. It has too often forgotten the key questions about what and whose knowledge should be official. It has become lost in postmodern abstractions and deconstructive despair. It is hermetic in too many ways and has in the process lost its ability to speak clearly about some major problems facing schools, teachers, students and communities. With neoliberal, neoconservative, authoritarian populist, and new managerial forces increasingly occupying the space of real policies and practices, we have little voice in the public debates over the realities of schooling and the decisions of curriculum policies and practices. The field of education deserves more.

In this essay, I first discuss where the article "Doing Things the 'Right' Way" that was published in this journal in 2005 fits into my corpus of work. In many ways, it represents a coming together of the various influences that have continued to form me over the nearly five decades I have been engaged in critically examining the relationship between educational theories, policies and practices, and differential power. Like many others, my work has been guided by two major goals: understanding and interrupting dominance. This has required that we become more nuanced in our critical analyses of the dynamics of power and the agents who wield it and that we not be satisfied with simplistic slogans that may be effective for rallying opposition but are much less effective at determining tactics and spaces of possibility. Thus, my aim is not only to both grasp and counter dominant policies and practices, but also to engage in fraternal criticism of what I take to be overly simplistic work by some parts of the Left as well. Given the increasing power of neoliberal, neoconservative, authoritarian populist and new managerial policies in education and the larger society, I next critically examine how and why the Right is ascendant. Finally, I detail a range of crucial tasks in which the critical scholar/activist in education should engage if we are to respond to these conditions in politically and ethically robust ways.

In this article, the author examines the ways in which the claim to subaltern status has led to a partial withdrawal from state-run institutions and to a practice of schooling that is meant to equip the children of authoritarian populist parents both with an armor to defend what these groups believe is their threatened culture and with a set of skills and values that will change the world so that it reflects the conservative religious commitments that are so central to their lives. He focuses on the ways in which new technologies such as the Internet have become essential resources--in essence "the" model of teacher education--in what authoritarian populists see as a counter-hegemonic struggle against secular humanism and a world that no longer "listens to God's word" (Apple, 2006). He argues that only by placing these technologies back into the social and ideological context of their use by specific communities (and by specific people within these communities) can people understand the meaning and function of new technologies in society and in education. In order to accomplish this, the author also focuses on the labor of home schooling, on how it is organized, on new definitions of legitimate knowledge and legitimate teaching, and on how all this has been partly transformed by the ways in which technological markets are being created. Much of the author's discussion centers around the place of gender in social movements, since conservative women have multiple identities within them, simultaneously able to claim subaltern status based on the history of dominant gender regimes, and having dominant status given their positioning in relationship to other oppressed groups. (Contains 7 notes.)