Despite the divisions within Northern Ireland's education system along religious and academic lines, it has managed to maintain relative stability, or at least a functional inertia, over the past four decades. The full potential, however, of this system and in particular, the Northern Ireland Curriculum (NIC), has yet to be realised. This paper…

Vygotsky's (1993) "Fundamentals of Defectology" is a radical's handbook of deaf and disability studies. Vygotsky's overall research program views disabilities, including deafness, from an integrated biosocial and critical theory standpoint. In two movements, I introduce an "American Annals of the Deaf Special Issue" on…

Within the neoliberal university, scholarship, education, students, academic staff, and practices are subordinated to managerial imperatives. University educators are denigrated and displaced by colonising neoliberal practices that systemically invalidate and invisibilise academic work. The present article provides an example of this by critically…

The ongoing ecological crisis and the more recent Coronavirus crisis challenge the grand narrative of Enlightenment that human beings are 'masters of nature'. For millennia, human "social learning" has allowed "Homo sapiens" to outpace most of our competitor creatures and live a comfortable life, but this competitive success…

This article draws on psychoanalytic theory to reconsider democracy, education and their relationship. The author argues for the pervasive presence of fantasmatic thinking in relation to both democracy and education in much media and policy discussion, which fuels our subjection to ideology through cruelly optimistic promises about the future…

One of the many facets of educational leadership is the emotional aspects of educational leadership itself. Leaders are regularly immersed in emotionally charged broad-based policy debates and political subjects like protests and voting policies. These are policy subjects that politically occur not only in schools where educational leaders…

Many approaches to political education take it to involve the construction of particular sections of the curriculum in which political matters are addressed -- named perhaps "civics" or "citizenship education". While these approaches have often been beneficial, they are all also problematic and controversial in some degree.…

This article explores the values that bridge democracy and community dance. Policymakers show an interest in promoting democracy, including the very values shared between community dance and democracy. Observing this, we propose that policy may benefit from examining the pedagogy and practices of community dance, and incorporate relevant aspects…

Beginning in the twenties of the previous century, the writings of Anton Semjonovitch Makarenko, an educator who was born in the Ukranian part of the former Russia and mainly spoke and wrote in Russian, attracted much attention among educators not only in the Russian-speaking world and in communist states but also in the Western world and other…

This paper presents a critical analysis of the four dimensions of critical literacy (FDCL), a framework widely known among the scholars and practitioners in the field of critical literacy. It begins with a literature review of critical literacy. Then each dimension of FDCL is described in detail through the use of a children's book. In addition,…

This article critically explores the realities of our own border classroom resistance--the "story-circle" dialogue protocol--as a liminal, local practice of resistance to discursive practices of education and broader politics which seek to surveil students and teachers and commodify their achievement. More broadly, we suggest here…

In this paper I explore how citizenship education might position students as always/everywhere political to diminish the pervasive belief that one either is or is not a "political person." By focusing on how liberal and radical democracy are both necessary frameworks for engaging with issues of power, I address how we might reframe…

In this paper, we aim to outline what foundations can offer in terms of understanding education and educational practice, and thus for providing a basis for teachers' professional knowledge. We look critically at the struggle foundation disciplines often experience with coherence and integration in terms of both their relation to each other and to…

Though family engagement has become a priority in early childhood education and care, there are problems in our understanding of the phenomenon. First, there is uncertainty about the target of outcomes--namely, should it be children or families? Second, the early childhood field lacks ethical guidance to address the complexity of this…

"Chinese" is an ambiguous term, depending on whether it is taken to describe a political, linguistic, or cultural entity. While the term has often been considered to represent a politically and culturally homogeneous national identity in recent decades, this article aims to challenge this notion by examining the characteristics and…