Educational equity dominates discussions of US schooling. However, what "educational equity" means is much contested in the scholarly literature and in public discourses. We follow the lead of scholars of color who have problematized the definition of educational equity. They have shown that the dominant, taken-for-granted definitions of…

The overall question addressed in this article is,"What kind of philosophy of education is relevant to educational policy makers?" The article focuses on the following four themes: The meanings attached to the term philosophy (of education) by philosophers themselves; the meanings attached to the term philosophy (of education) by policy…

We report on a three-year study of teachers' experiences of a major reform of the science National Curriculum for 14- to 16-year-olds in England. Teachers' responses to this curriculum reform were guided by: "personal" aims and biography; "internal" features of their workplace such as departmental collegiality; and…

How to best address the professional learning needs of those aspiring to leadership roles in schools is a crucial issue. Robust evaluation practices are needed to determine the quality of current provisions and to identify where improvements can be made. This paper considers the quality of professional learning programmes using a set of 10…

This is the first of six commentaries discussing Zongjie Wu's essay, "Interpretation, autonomy, and transformation". Wu's analyses of pedagogy have opened a new window for looking at the essence of education. The comparison of Confucius's pedagogy with contemporary teaching in China provides a striking contrast. However, perhaps it is…

School is sometimes framed as a place for preparing, a place for becoming college and career ready. At times this approach positions school as an important space "within" the world of college and careers, envisioned perhaps as Dewey imagined it, as a safe place to try things, a space where real work of participation in society could be done but in…

We don't have a lot of evidence of what people see and think about communities after the fact. What are their worldviews when they look at experiences in blended learning communities in retrospect? Which elements do they find most meaningful? This study explores the character, meaning, and impact of community using the lived experiences of…

This article explores historical reasoning, an important activity in history learning. Based upon an extensive review of empirical literature on students' thinking and reasoning about history, a theoretical framework of historical reasoning is proposed. The framework consists of six components: asking historical questions, using sources,…

The article explores the complexities of educational scale-making. "Educational scales" are defined as the spatial and temporal orders generated as pupils and teachers move and are moved through educational systems; scales are "envelopes of spacetime" into which certain schoolbased identities (and not others) can be folded.…