Despite an extensive body of literature that has examined the role of museums in cultural reproduction and public education, most of the current discussion is western-centred. Whilst explorations of museum education in developing countries often focus on the institution, the agency perspective regarding how different social groups negotiate access…

This paper offers an ethnographic account of how Golden Harvest International School in Bengaluru branded itself as both 'International' and 'Indian', by elaborating discursive practices within the school. Drawing upon scholarship that has sought to delineate the ways in which globally hyper-mobile Indians construct a distinctive cultural…

Students attain cultural knowledge to navigate college admissions, yet few studies investigate when and how students activate this knowledge in a relatively transparent system. Drawing upon 26 Taiwanese student interviews, this study unveils how students strategically use available information to illuminate each step of the admission process. I…

Research on homework, particularly using qualitative approaches, is neglected in sociological literature. This qualitative study uses a Bourdieusian interpretive lens to explore parental homework practices in a middle-class, urban setting in Ireland. In-depth semi-structured interviews were held with six parents and six teachers of pupils aged…

The Japanese community in Singapore comprises mainly white-collar workers and their families. This article addresses issues concerning education, overseas living, and identity-related investments made visible by way of examining schooling and parenting practices. Framed within a critique which recognizes schooling and identity investment as being…

In this article we describe evolving educational aspirations and practices of female high school students and their families in the context of rapidly changing education and employment markets in Kolkata. We interviewed 35 families of girls attending two government high schools. The families are from lower middle-class and lower income…

The present study explores how officials in Swedish secondary schools define and categorize situations in which students have been exposed to violence in the school. The study is designed as a case study of two secondary schools, situated in two demographically different urban neighbourhoods. The results indicate that different socio-economic…

This paper presents a theoretical argument regarding the power of school to shape parental involvement in culturally informed ways. The paper emerges out of preliminary fieldwork among Jewish middle-class parents in a town in northern Israel, during which our attention was drawn to the intense activity in and around their children's transition to…

In recent decades, many countries began integrating global citizenship education (GCE) into their curricula, both in response to the needs of a diversified pupil body formed by global migrations flows and as a means to prepare pupils to compete and engage in modern globalized society. Frequently, this integration takes place alongside an…

Research points to sections of the middle-class repopulating the "ordinary" urban public school and whilst there are key differences in how they are navigating public school choices, from "seeking a critical mass" to resisting traditional methods of choice and going "against-the-grain", or collectively campaigning for…

Existing international research suggests that widespread performative pedagogy has contributed to producing educational inequalities for "disadvantaged" learners. There have also been calls for alternative pedagogies, which can be characterised as child-centred. This paper analyses pupils' hierarchical positioning in a contemporary,…

This paper reports on data drawn from a study exploring the educational strategies of 62 Black Caribbean heritage middle-class parents. In this paper, we consider the respective roles of race and class in the shaping of parents' educational strategies, deploying an analysis that focuses on their intersection and seeks to hold both race and class…

The white middle-class parents who chose to send their children to urban comprehensives largely rejected engaging in the usual competitiveness for educational success. Nevertheless the parents in our study still found themselves wittingly or otherwise captured by that same discourse. Their children are high achievers and are regarded as a valuable…

Based mainly on my own ethnographic research, which is committed to uncovering the constructed or "practiced" nature of social life, I seek to demonstrate the ways in which Australian school teachers, administrators, students and parents are engaged in a re-productive process that simultaneously reinforces and reinvents schools and…

Germany's national (or ethnic) identity has become thoroughly European and there are even signs of Eurocentrism. This is particularly problematic for the Turkish Muslims who, arguably, are not European. This article explores how fifteen-year-old German and Turkish youth in two Stuttgart secondary schools, one in a predominantly working-class area…