A sociology of conventions perspective is used in this paper to examine how non-profit organizations make sense of their educational action in the field of training for employment. Both critiques of education that such organizations voiced and compromises that they had to establish at the turn of the 21st century are revisited here in view of the…

In this article, we address the questions: How is the purpose of higher education constructed within policy texts from the European Higher Education Area (EHEA), England and Sweden? How does this position students in making the transition from Bachelor to Masters? We do this through analysis of two recent policy documents from each of the EHEA,…

Based on ethnographic fieldwork in six different types of rural area and their schools in different parts of Sweden, this article identifies how rural schools relate to the local place and discusses some of the educational implications from this. Recurrent references to the local community were present in some schools and people there explicitly…

This paper offers first-hand accounts of refugees beyond the age of compulsory education having arrived in Austria during the last five years. Their accounts were collected using qualitative interviews and a visual method to allow for different approaches towards their educational biographies. Nine individual and two group interviews (altogether…

In this article, the focus is on exploring the perspective of equity in curriculum. From a background of understanding curriculum as embedded in wider transnational policy movements, in this article the author suggests a framework for exploring the trajectories between equity policy and different types of curricula with implications for what…

In recent years Finnish comprehensive education has often been discussed in both, academic and public forums, in terms of its relatively high learning outcomes and perceived efficiency. Yet what has often been lacking in cross-country comparisons is a critical socio-historical analysis of contingent nation-specific events and features as well as…

This article aims to question the relevance of notions such as "laforme scolair"' in the account of the French state action in keeping up with the development of mass schooling, over a long historical process (from the late nineteenth century to the present day). Through its origin, this model is linked to a Universalist philosophical…

Long before Namibia's independence in 1990, Sweden initiated a policy dialogue with Namibia's future political leadership. This article reviews the impact of an educational reform in Namibia in the early 1990s called the Integrated Teacher Training Programme (ITTP), which was an outcome of collaboration between the South West African People's…

This study analyses and evaluates the impact of two recent (2001 and 2010) education reforms on Ukrainian secondary schools, and, in particular, on science subjects (physics, chemistry, biology and Earth science), in terms of the structural, quantitative and qualitative characteristics of the reformed disciplines. It also examines societal…

The article tries to defend the thesis that our educational systems are not doing well (which is not at all original), that the philosophy of education, more often than not, accompanies, justifies and reinforces the malaise of the system (which is already more original), and that it should, without a doubt, question itself in order to know how to…

This article reviews excerpts from a body of ethnographic data examining some young people's disaffection from, and refusal of, the education project as a whole in a UK coalfield area. Key examples are used to illustrate intergenerational continuities and disjunctions in attitudes to formal education in these exceptional and sometimes…

In this article, the authors examine the development of the Swedish educational reform of 1991 from an international and European perspective, and from the perspective of what counts as knowledge in a recently implemented Swedish curriculum reform. With effect from 2011, the Swedish Government has significantly reshaped the curricula for…

Is the university to be thought of as in service of society - that is, on the inside? Or should it be regarded rather as its potential critic and prophet of its best prospects, and hence be understood to be on the outside? This is just one example of the multiple ways in which thinking in terms of the inside and the outside figures in educational…

What is proposed is a meditation on the phrase "transformation of the educational system", paying attention to the sense of the words, and showing what the desire for educational change can reveal. After explaining to what extent "educational system" is a quasi-oxymoron, the meaning of "transformation" has to be…

Whilst the notion of children's rights and an entitlement to express their views and participate as global citizens is threaded throughout the international policy field, children's perspectives on the near ubiquitous practice of homework, and its effects on their daily lives and learner subjectivities, remain under-researched. Drawing on the…