In studying the performance of academic systems, one often tries to find out--by inspecting some well-defined parameters--how specific changes in the legal system influence the volume and quality of desired outputs, such as publications, patents, or alumni. This mechanistic approach neglects the fact that the main actors in this spectacle are not…

Social policies that criminalize students can create a school environment that pushes immigrant students out of school and into immigration enforcement agencies' crosshairs. The school-to-prison pipeline is a well-documented phenomenon rooted in institutional racism and affects marginalized immigrant groups uniquely. The study aims to dissect the…

"Sharing is caring" the old adage goes, with its implied message that both are morally desirable. But what if it's test answers that students are sharing with their friends? Integrating values, cheating, and in-group bias theory, we hypothesize that adherence to group-loyalty benevolence values--considered as some of the most moral…

"Undiscussables" are topics associated with threat or embarrassment that are avoided by groups, where that avoidance is also not discussed. Their deleterious effect on executive groups has been a point of discussion for several decades. More recently critical action learning (AL) has brought a welcome focus to power relations within AL…

Moral competence is important for soldiers who have to deal with complex moral dilemmas in practice. However, openly dealing with moral dilemmas and showing moral competence is not always easy within the culture of a military organization. In this article, based on analysis of experiences during a train the trainer course on military ethics, we…

This paper presents the proposition that a variety of differing hierarchies exist in an action learning set at any one time, and each hierarchy has the potential to affect an individual's behaviour within the set. An interpretivist philosophy underpins the research framework adopted in this paper. Data were captured by means of 11 in-depth…

This account draws upon learning from an incident in an action learning set where an individual challenged a mandatory organisational requirement. As a facilitator I reflect upon my initial defensive reaction to this challenge. The use of critical action learning to inform ourselves as facilitators of the underlying tensions between set members…

This article provides a longitudinal analysis of leadership. In the first section of the article, the evidence reviewed indicates how, historically, leadership has been significant in various societal arrangements in the co-ordination of actions for collective purposes. Such co-ordination may also be facilitated through self-organisation, except…

This article argues that under neoliberal casino capitalism there has been a wholesale attack not only on the social state but also on those public spheres that enable the formative cultures necessary to produce critical agents, engaged subjects, and the literacies necessary to make power and authority accountable. In this instance, the struggle…

This paper examines how two sites of adult learning in the food movement create educational alternatives to the dominant U.S. food system. It further examines how these pedagogies challenge racialised, classed and gendered ideologies and practices in their aims, curricular content, and publically documented educational processes. The first case is…

In this article, the authors describe a class activity that uses a combination of strategies to overcome obstacles students face when learning about the reproduction of inequality in everyday life. Based on Schwalbe et al.'s (2000) piece on "generic social processes," and following the idea of "making the strange familiar and the familiar…

This article looks at research undertaken into two international schools focusing on micropolitics and the importance of school location. Location appears to have a significant impact on the behaviour of those associated with each school, such as reactions to physical environment, local culture and clientele. These affect the micropolitical…

This article is a theoretical, experiential and reflective analysis of potential problems that may arise when teaching cohorts of students. Although more often than not teaching cohorts of students can be a fulfilling experience, the authors have, on occasion, taught cohort groups that were challenging. The authors speculate whether this…

This article conveys results from a participatory action research (PAR) engagement with activist/educators working in Ghanaian social movements. First, this PAR group has articulated two typologies from which to understand Ghanaian social movements based on their processes of organization, communication and learning rather than merely the issues,…

In this article I respond to the analyses of "Educating the 'Right' Way" and "The State and the Politics of Knowledge" that were given by Stephen Ball, Russell Fox and Antonio Novoa. I situate the development of the kinds of argument that these books make, in the larger corpus of my work and in the growth of neoliberal, neoconservative,…