Aaron Koh contributed to a collection of multi-site global ethnographic articles published here (2014, Vol. 12, No. 2) that present class reproduction as operationalised in elite education. While the collection adds to the current international critique of meritocracy, a close look at Koh's contribution reveals that critical ethnography can lose…

Background/Context: Despite calls for equity in education, the dominant mode of schooling reproduces hierarchies, positioning some students as bright, gifted, or fast learners and others as lazy, in need of remediation, or slow. A number of studies have shown that teachers' professional communities and networks can address this problem and enhance…

Background/Context: Despite calls for equity in education, the dominant mode of schooling reproduces hierarchies, positioning some students as bright, gifted, or fast learners and others as lazy, in need of remediation, or slow. A number of studies have shown that teachers' professional communities and networks can address this problem and enhance…

The recently launched Australian Curriculum Health and Physical Education has five propositions, one of which is for students to adopt a critical inquiry approach within this subject area. In particular, students are encouraged to explore issues that relate to social power and taken-for-granted assumptions. This paper problematizes the concept of…

This article draws on Foucault's later work to consider in an exploratory but specific way how that work can inform educational research. It introduces the concepts of "capillary discourses" and "fissure points" to show, by way of example, how a regime of truth such as neoliberalism shapes lifelong learning theory, the pedagogy…

In this paper, I utilize complementary features of critical discourse analysis (CDA) and Actor-Network Theory (ANT) to trace and investigate issues of power, materiality, and reproduction embedded within notions of citizenship and civic engagement. I interrogate the often narrow and conservative political and public discourses in Arizona that…

This article explores how and why a group of Latino/a high school students identify and explain racism differently over the course of an 18-month participatory action research (PAR) project. To do this we examine what recent scholarship has termed racial microaggressions in what is thought of as the Post-Racial America public school system.…

Motivated by the addition of a curriculum standard for active citizenship into New Jersey's social studies standards a group of educators and researchers set out to integrate an action research curriculum, based on a youth participatory action research (YPAR) model, into social studies classrooms. Adapting YPAR, with its promising blend of…

Literacy "sponsorship" in refugee communities is not without its risks and limitations. For potential sponsors, risks include the commodification of refugee voices, while limits include inaccurate generalizations of those being sponsored. This essay draws from a case study of refugee student discourse to discuss how a more explicit…

The research presented in this article investigates the role of classroom discussions for supporting students' ongoing identity work during the study of global issues. Civic identity is theorized as a socially constructed process in which individuals become associated as a particular type of citizen created through social interactions in a given…

The central thesis of this article is that conceptualizations of accountability systems need to be more encompassing to accommodate the current diversity of school choice. This article examines an emerging type of school that specializes in advanced STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) curriculum for gifted and academically…

Public schools failing to meet accountability standards have been shut down, taken over by charter organizations, or undergone reconstitution. This article challenges deficit views of students as passive and complacent in a schooling context dictated by accountability sanctions. Drawing from counterpublic theory, it describes a case study that…

Globalisation and technological advances in the twenty-first century have caused a blurring of national lines, which in the past were the basis of a nearly indisputable model of civic identity. This process has led to a noticeable trend of the globally oriented pressures within the national curricula, on top of the existing locally oriented…

This article shows how equity research in mathematics education can be decentered by reporting the "voices" of mathematically successful African American male students as they recount their experiences with school mathematics, illustrating, in essence, how they negotiated the White male math myth. Using post-structural theory, the…

Scholars who document neoliberal trends in education argue that privatization and corporatization in schools is dehumanizing and discourages democratic participation. These scholars assert that neoliberal education policies heighten social inequity by emphasizing individualism, marketability and colorblindness without interrogating social…