While many recognise the impact formal education has on human flourishing, often overlooked are the forces in society that shape our conception of the good life. Our understanding of flourishing is formed as much by the culture we live in as by the classrooms we learn in. This oversight impacts our ability to think clearly about flourishing…

This essay reflects on the longer-term challenges posed to societal, political and educational sectors following the imposition of a shutdown of schools and universities by many governments around the world in response to the COVID-19 pandemic of 2020. Using Rene Girard's analysis of festivals as concealing originary violence, it reflects on the…

In this address I identify specific and unique roles anthropology can play in the necessary work of decolonizing education. These include: building anti-racist schools that honor all "ways of being human"; decolonizing school leadership and working towards culture creation for equity and anti-racism; decolonizing teaching and learning…

The purpose of this study considers the intersections of education abroad and alumni engagement through a social justice lens. This research examines the "cultural imperative to systemic reform" (Kozaitis, 2013, p. 139) through the perspective of higher education's integration of education abroad as a core high-impact practice (Kuh,…

The Ofsted Subject report series: Religious Education (2024) and the CoRE report (2018) critically evaluate the shortcomings of the current Religious Education (RE) curriculum in UK schools, highlighting a lack of depth and consistency that inadequately prepares students for a diverse and complex world. This paper proposes the integration of…

Today's education has three impediments to meaningful and sustainable educational reform; first, the lack of precise and accurate anthropology of learners; second, dilemma between constructivism-leading academy and behaviorism-dominating classrooms; third, the lack of philosophy of education in theory and practice. The Montessori system was built…

This is the second of two articles on World Bank support for technical and vocational education and training in sub-Saharan Africa. The first article reviewed the World Bank's latest policy document on TVET in SSA. This article takes a broader historical perspective by examining the evolution of World Bank policy and practice in this key area of…

"Literacy Theories for the Digital Age" insightfully brings together six essential approaches to literacy research and educational practice. The book provides powerful and accessible theories for readers, including Socio-cultural, Critical, Multimodal, Socio-spatial, Socio-material and Sensory Literacies. The brand new Sensory Literacies…

This volume offers a timely collection of research-based studies that engage with contemporary conditions of precarity across an array of locations, exploring how it is understood, experienced, and acted upon by educators in schools, universities, and nonformal educational spaces. Precarity presents as layered, unpredictable, destabilizing, and…

Studies on educational change efforts abound but generally limit themselves to post hoc explanations of failure and success. Such explanations are rarely turned into attempts at providing models for predicting change outcomes. The present study tries to develop such a model based on the teachers' impact analysis of a management-driven…

Recent analyses of education policy discourses in Europe and beyond note the rise of the discourse of "employability" as a new form of regulating the relationship between universities, markets and the state. Education and labour market relationships are also considered to be one of the main aspects of postsocialist transition. This…

Rather than assume the relevance of "a priori" scalar distinctions (micro-, macro-, meso-), this article examines scale as an emergent dimension of sociospatial practice in educational institutions. Focusing on Buddhist debate at Tibetan monasteries in India, I describe how this educational practice has been placed as a rite of…

Education reform movements often promise more than they deliver. Why are such promises plausible in light of seemingly perpetual education reform? Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork based in a nonprofit education reform organization, this article explores the appeal of popular notions about "using data to close the racial achievement…

Ideas of linear progress and predictability are essential to globally circulated ideas of educational planning, but do not necessarily correspond with the realities and priorities of ordinary people whose life trajectories often shape very differently. Thus, shedding light on the contradictory ideas about education and divergent expectations as to…

This project offers a close look into the meaning-making practices of the Bulgarian socialist state with regard to the conception and enactment of childhood. Held for the first time in 1979, on occasion of the UN declared "International Year of the Child", the International Children's Assembly "Banner of Peace" emerges as a…