Colour-blind discourse represents dominant American racial ideologies surrounding principles of equal opportunity and assumptions that racism and systemic racial inequities are things of the past, 'naturally occurring' issues, or problems relegated to individual choices and behaviours. Qualitative researchers who seek to disrupt the legitimation…

Drawing on the notion of translanguaging, I show how learners in a Black township secondary school in Cape Town use their multilingual repertoire to achieve power, agency and voice. I use the conceptualisation of the prototypical pedagogical macrogenre from systemic functional linguistics to show how translanguaging can be used strategically to…

Diane Ravitch has emerged as one of the most powerful forces for real education reform. She is a tireless crusader against the baseless claims that drive current educational policy and a clear-eyed visionary of what needs to be done. While at one time she left the educational community and then returned (both of which she addresses in this…

Cara Hoffman's work enacts George Orwell's imperative to "pay attention to the obvious" (an idea that several sympathetic characters repeat in her 2011 novel "So Much Pretty"), probing aspects of twenty-first century life in the United States that have become so accepted as to be unremarkable, such as epidemic levels of…

In this article, David Forrest probes Ahmad Sarmast (Founder and Director of the Afghanistan National Institute of Music, Ministry of Education, Afghanistan) about the development of the Institute, its sponsorship, the range of local musicians and music educators that work there, and the student population.

This profile celebrates and chronicles selected themes and highlights of the ideas, scholarly accomplishments, leadership, humanity, and work ethic of Edwin L. Herr, one of the major forces in the counseling profession, for purposes of archiving elements of his history and stimulating continuity of his ideas, achievements, and dedication.

This article discusses how history, the cultural setting, and the political-ideological contexts may influence educational research in China. It seeks to demonstrate a dichotomy between official and popular discourses, and argues that there is a need for the researcher to understand and interpret the language style used in various interview…

This article reports key findings from in-depth interviews with undergraduate students returning from international service trips (ISTs). These interviews examined students' perceptions of social change activities and assessed students' affinity toward service and activism independently as well as the perceived relationship and interaction between…

Israeli-Palestinian peace is promoted through political and diplomatic channels, as well as indirect channels such as conferences, lectures, meetings, workshops and political journalism. However, there is less awareness of the extensive artistic activity in Israel surrounding peace and its implications for society, or of the uniqueness of the…

This article considers curriculum ownership, contestation and the relationship between curriculum and culture through the lens of the Exploring Masculinities (EM) programme. The programme was developed in the late 1990s to meet the social and personal needs of young men. As its dissemination was being planned, it became the subject of critical…

This article explores possibilities for extending aboriginal language education opportunities into the urban domain based on qualitative research in Vancouver, British Columbia. The author argues that aboriginal language revitalization efforts have a place in the city, as demonstrated by emerging language ideologies of urban aboriginal people…

For six months in 2008, as a Fulbright Scholar, this author served as a senior researcher at the Centre for Conflict Management at the National University of Rwanda where he conducted research into the lives of survivors of the 1994 genocide. The research comprised lengthy interviews (between seven and fifteen hours) with each survivor. The…

This article considers language learner agency from a poststructuralist perspective, focusing on how agency is discursively constituted as individuals position themselves and are positioned as (potential) agents within ideologically defined spaces. As such, I regard agency as inherently unstable and as a discursively mobilized capacity to act.…

Elder statesman Lee Kuan Yew maintains that a society ruled by elites is necessary to provide for high growth and social progress. Elitism conjures a class divide; an ongoing concern is a disconnection between elite and the citizens it has to represent. In the tradition of political socialization, and using the case study approach, this article…

High fee-charging non-government schools for boys comprise a small but significant sector of the Australian schooling market. In different ways in different historical periods these schools have represented themselves as being concerned with more than just an instrumental or utilitarian education, making both explicit and implicit claims about the…