Purpose: This paper aims to problematise practice and contribute to new understandings of professional and workplace learning. Practice is a concept which has been largely taken for granted and under-theorised in workplace learning and education research. Practice has usually been co-located with classifiers, such as legal practice, vocational…

This article critically surveys scholarly themes relating to the study of values in educational administration and their implications for administrative practice. It is suggested that values perspectives for school leaders emerged largely in response to the determinism of the Theory Movement, particularly the emphases on individuals as the primary…

Prevailing socioeducational models--liberal educational theory, human capital theory, and critical reproductive approaches--do not address Latin American realities related to the struggle for educational access by marginal groups, the role of technical scientific knowledge in economic growth and social power, and effects of social forces on…

This paper provides a critical review essay of Ajay Sharma's "Portrait of a science teacher as a bricoleur: A case study from India." The main focus is two fold. First, arguments are presented to draw attention to how little advances in science teaching and science learning research have impacted teachers' practice and student…

The global rescaling of the world, culture, and education has influenced how people experience their situationality, meaning-making, and learning in relation to the Other. This article explores the implications of spatial analysis for rethinking education in new conditions of cultural complexity. The experience of living and learning with…

The development of critical ethnography in education is traced, and the central epistemological and methodological issues in the practice of critical ethnography are discussed. Some of the directions the field appears to be taking are considered. Critical ethnography in education began in the late 1960's and early 1970's, with roots in the…

Much has happened since the first edition of this book in the arenas of policy development, research and practice. Early childhood education is at the heart of policy-making agendas in England and many other developed and developing countries. Concerns with the quality of provision have sparked a massive international research endeavour, which is…

Describes the dialogue between an American researcher and others as she planned and carried out a study of women's literacy programs in rural Mali. Discusses the researcher's status in relation to the organization administering the programs, cultural differences in terms of researcher versus practitioner and Westerner versus African, and reasons…

The sociocultural paradigm in educational research, emphasizing the situatedness of learning and the embeddedness of thought in cultural and linguistic practices, has called into question the plausibility of the enterprise of teaching general thinking skills. In this paper I argue that the sociocultural research programme needs an adequate…

Maintains that within the qualitative paradigm there are related approaches with distinct disciplinary and intellectual traditions. Examines three genres: (1) educational connoisseurship and criticism; (2) ethnography; and (3) action research. Asserts that understanding the assumptions, methods, and contributions of these genres can expand art…

This book examines the implications of postmodern culture for adult education through a review of modernist culture and education and a comparative account of modernist and postmodernist culture that is configured as a set of six tensions in three domains: belief (situatedness and ambiguity); individual identity (determination and control); and…

We reflect on methodological issues arising in two of our own research projects as a form of practice, as a way of engaging in a praxis of project research. The projects chosen for this purpose are themselves concerned with teacher education and curriculum development in environmental education: they include participatory "reflective…