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This article subjects contemporary informed discourse on the Credit Crunch/Great Recession/Long Recession to educational analysis and deconstruction. Such pro-capitalist but not uncritical discourse is well represented by the UK "Financial Times", whose columns between 2008 and 2012 comprise most of our data. We argue that the metaphors of the "meltdown" are significant and performative, allowing variously moralised narratives to emerge as implicit diagnoses and remedies. In particular we identify a "domestic" register of metaphors whose contained and homely tropes of austerity, prudence, book-balancing and so on stand in dramatic contrast to a more melodramatic register, centring on various disaster scenarios. What is of most interest is that financial journalists and commentators switch between these registers, and allow "crossovers" between them which are powerful in their discursive effects and political persuasiveness. These metaphorical discursive resources are intimately connected to the sorts of educational registers that characterise the "knowledge economy". We conclude that our cultural ability to tell these sorts of stories rests as much on an underlying moral and theological storying as it does on any "scientific" economic account (if such there can be, which we doubt). In this way we seek to educate economic discourses that are, as it were, "economical with the truth".

We present here a reflexive and critical commentary and exemplification of the teaching and learning of research methodology. The paper focuses on the teaching/learning of qualitative data analysis. It is our belief that it is essential to "do" data analysis when learning about the process and that there are serious limitations to methodological "manuals" which set out to model the process. In doctoral workshops, Frankham and Stronach have used a passage by Jules Henry to provoke students into generating data which is then analysed as a group. This paper, written with a group of doctoral students, describes the reflexive and iterative processes of data analysis which took place in one such group. We hope that describing our discussions will be of practical use to others in our attempt to iterate a "process." Our other purposes include a desire to underline the inappropriacy of the notion of "skills" in the context of research "training" or of following formulaic procedures in interpretive inquiry. Instead the process we set out to illustrate here is embodied and serendipitous and centres on individuals' capacity to "think."

In this article, a deconstructive "survol" of the term "standards" suggests that the concept contributes to an "outside-in" professionalism masquerading as "inside-out" professionalism. In examining a case of "standards" in action, the authors point out the inadequacy of "standards" as tools of appraisal with remainders, reductions, displacements, elisions and embellishments--"mistranslations"--being inevitable. The second part of the article addresses the external world of standards, as a form of power applied by state agencies to professional work and identity, in which the application of standards typically strip out subjectivity, and with it much of the immeasurable dimensions that constitute professional action. Rather than writing off "standards" as yet another bureaucratic self-delusion, the authors take note of Strathern's call for a "new political and managerial discourse of uncertainty" and suggest that professional or peer review would benefit if parties to the appraisal process, "inter alia," undertake the "risk" of decision, acknowledge the inevitability of "incomplete evidence", engage in extended empathy and avoid overly reductive quantification. (Contains 8 notes.)

This article considers 8 critical hypotheses that circumscribe the development of U.K. education in the 21st century. They all derive directly or indirectly from the "Great Recession" and have radical implications for any notion of a "knowledge economy" and the nature of educational professionalism. The authors conclude that neither a "scientific capitalism" nor its socialist equivalent provide a basis for future thinking and advocate a new beginning on the basis of critical qualitative thinking in relation to both education and the economy. (Contains 23 notes.)

This article contrasts the collapse of the twin political certainties of the 20th century--"scientific socialism" (1989) and "scientific capitalism" (2008). Such a collapse restores Uncertainty to her throne, and brings back the need to radically rethink political possibilities for the future. (Contains 1 note.)

This article draws on data from a single element of a larger project which focused on the issue of "touching" between education and child care professionals and children in a number of settings. This case study looks at a school once internationally renowned as the exemplar of "free" schooling. The authors consider how the school works as a community, how it impacts on its students, and how it copes with the strictures of the audit culture in relation to "risk" and "safety." The authors' experiences led them to the realization that physical "touch" was an irrelevant focus in this school, and they developed the notion of "relational touch." Summerhill works in ways that approximate an inversion of the audit culture. The authors argue that progressive and critical conceptions of education continue to have much to learn from concrete examples like Summerhill and conclude that a revival of such values in education is long overdue. (Contains 25 notes.)

This article offers a deconstruction of the RAE Education sub-panel's rubrics, drawing also on the broader RAE regulations, procedures, and associated documentation and research. It seeks to tease out the sorts of covert epistemologising that may (or may not) be likely to take place. The theoretical ambition is to take a Derridean approach to acts of "translation", reworking that metaphor as a way into the acts of translation that the RAE undertakes in placing numerical values on the quality of research outputs. How do we measure our "pounds of flesh"? As a practical "hermeneutics of suspicion" it seeks a "provocative validity" in that its aim is to provoke clarity and reassurance from the authors of such RAE documents. In that ambition it has had some success, as the response from Margaret Brown, Chair of the Education sub-panel, demonstrates. (Contains 7 notes.)

This article examines the state's contemporary construction of "sex" as an educational problem in England. It does so by interrogating the notion of the "pregnant teenager" as it is semantically and statistically constructed in accountability discourses, as well as research constrained within them. It then examines certain features of an exemplary solution to the problem, as proffered by one of the largest contemporary research projects into sex education in the United Kingdom (the RIPPLE project). A critique is offered of the "scientific" nature of some of these findings. The authors claim conclusions to be undermined by statistical and rhetorical gerrymandering, a prejudicial rendering of pupil "voice", and an underlying reductionism. The article concludes that many of the features of such current problem-constructing and solution-rendering can be characterised as a false invocation of "Science", and that their conjunction fuels an enduring infantilisation of educational discourses about sex and sex education. (Contains 1 table, 2 figures and 23 notes.)

This article approaches the current state of qualitative inquiry by constructing an allegory of neo-imperialism. It is based substantively on a history and contemporary anthro-politics of the Congo and in particular the city of Kisangani; metaphorically on Conrad's unsettling deployment of that same place as "the heart of darkness"; and ironically on homologies between certain kinds of quantitative (and sometimes qualitative) inquiry that currently seek to colonize and civilize unruly educational discourses. Overall it draws on postmodernist/poststructuralist theoretical and narrative strategies, and on philosophies of difference, in order to explore novel ways of thinking and telling the Other to the Same. (Contains 5 notes.)

Discusses nature of professional identity, focusing on teachers and nurses, and articulates view of "professional" as "caught between an 'economy of performance' and various 'ecologies of practice'." Rejects over-simplified understanding of "professional" identity and advocates embracing "ambivalence and contradiction" within professional identities rather than trying to "reduce or resolve them." (Contains 115 references.) (KSB)

Explores and deconstructs the meanings of responsive evaluation, suggesting the many tensions within the theory. Interprets these tensions as spaces for ongoing reinvention of creative practice in evaluation. (SLD)

Deconstruction of three British nursing research projects found that, due to a "Utopian" perspective, they reintroduce theory-practice gaps they sought to close. Future nursing research should avoid idealistic prescriptions and promote more skeptical and realistic approaches. (SK)

Offers an interpretation of the dynamics of home-school relations in terms of a matrix of "mobilisations" and "demolisations" among parents, teachers, and children based upon data collected in an action research and development project. Aims to establish some bases for practical and theoretical "manoeuvers." (CMK)

Offers a retrospective deconstruction of research compromises undertaken during "quick and dirty" contract evaluation. Identifies constraining changes in the nature of research contexts and develops a positive view of methodological developments, that might create "transgressive validity." Considers notions of "hybridity" in research methodology and of "negotiation" in research procedures. (DSK)