School communities have been shut out of many of the more critical decision-making processes impacting local public schools. Decisions are mostly made as top-down actions from federal mandates, general assemblies, state departments, districts, and school level administration teams, isolating the school communities they are tasked to serve. To…

The neoliberal turn has driven attempts to marketize education, but how does marketization occur? In this article I draw on ethnographic and linguistic-ethnographic methods to investigate marketization through a microanalytic lens. My investigation focuses on a team of educational professionals, who participated in a workshop led by an…

In recent times, education policy and reform discourses have become increasingly politicised by neo-liberalism, with critical policy methodologies struggling to catch up. Critical policy sociologists have noted that critical commentaries rarely succeed in changing or impacting dominant education policy pathways. This article presents a framework…

In Ontario, Canada, principals' work is guided by competencies outlined in the Ontario Leadership Framework which reflect the leadership skills and behaviours needed to successfully lead schools, improve student achievement and well-being. The problem is that this document largely ignores equity and anti-oppressive leadership behaviours. The…

The coronavirus pandemic has heightened the sense of crisis in higher education, initiating a reconsideration of the conditions under which transformative change actually occurs. For some historians, the radical disruption of a social system occurs under four conditions: mass mobilization warfare, transformative revolution, state failure, and…

There is growing interest in reenergizing SoTL as a public scholarship that engages civic conversational spaces and debates about our most pressing public issues (Chick, 2019; Friberg, 2020). In the COVID landscape, debates on re- forming higher education -- often foreclosed within our neoliberal university contexts (Giroux, 2014, 2017) --…

Effective professional learning is acknowledged as a key lever to improve teacher practice. However, many studies report significant variation in the effectiveness of the types of programs on offer. Recently, there has been a move from the traditional single event, passive approach to more collaborative and ongoing forms of professional learning.…

Reform-based science instruction is guided by teachers' normative beliefs. Discursive claims are how teachers say they teach science. Previous research has studied the change in teachers' beliefs and how beliefs influence intended practice and action in the classroom. Few studies have connected what teachers believe, how they say they teach, and…

Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to compare stakeholders' roles in Germany and Switzerland when it comes to promoting innovation in the dual apprenticeship model. In both countries, the relevant stakeholders who represent the various occupations and, in a more narrow sense, the social partners, actively shape vocational education and training…

Regardless of the differing shades of neo-liberalism, successive governments have claimed to champion the cause of "special educational needs and/or disability" (SEND) through official Codes of Practice in 1994, 2001 and 2015. This analysis and comparison of the three Codes of Practice aims to contribute to the debate by exploring…

Challenges of broadening access, escalating cost, maintaining desirable quality and enhancing meaningful learning experiences in African higher education (HE) have spurred debates on how to restructure higher education delivery to meet the diverse needs of heterogeneous learners and adapt pedagogical models to the educational realities of…

In this piece I explore the concept of 'growth' in English teaching. Starting with John Dixon's 'growth' model, I argue that, by re-imagining his ideas in current contexts, practitioners might re-focus and re-invigorate the priorities of English teaching. Dominant conceptions of 'growth' are explored, along with their influence on teacher working…

The Functional Discourse Grammar model has a twofold objective: on the one hand, to provide a descriptively, psychologically and pragmatically adequate account of the forms made available by a typologically diverse range of languages; and on the other, to provide a model of language which is set up to reflect, at one remove, certain of the stages…

We analyzed two educational frameworks that seek to embed "education for sustainable development" into higher education (HE). Both identify that HE is failing to educate graduates able to address the sustainability needs of society and suggest approaches to remedy the situation. We used discourse analysis and framing analysis to explore…

Since the beginning of the federal Race To The Top grant competition, Value-Added Measurement (VAM) has captured the attention of the American public through high-profile media representations of the tool and the controversy that surrounds it. In this paper, we build upon investigations of constructions of VAM in the media and present a discourse…