While much of the critical scholarship around elite schooling has focused on the students who attend elite institutions, their social class locations, privileged habituses and cultural capital, this paper foregrounds curricular form itself as a central mechanism in the (re)production of elites. Using Basil Bernstein's conceptual framework of…

Argues that the conscious originating motives for both market-oriented and uniform standards approaches to improving the quality of teacher education may not guarantee the effects of such policies in the real world of real schools, noting that such reforms may have dangerous consequences unless efforts are situated within an honest analysis of…

Situates the experience of Porto Alegre in the larger political and educational context of Brazil; presents normative goals of the Citizen School and examines the mechanisms that helped forge these goals; describes and explains some elements of the institutional design of the Citizen School; evaluates potential problems of the project; offers some…

Provides an overview of the main theories, developments, and literature of critically-oriented sociology. Pays particular attention to the politics of meaning including critical discourse analysis, identity politics, racial formation, and political economy and the labor process. Concludes with a discussion of the tensions between postmodern and…