In Arizona, the expansion and elaboration of neoliberal educational policies over the past three decades in Arizona have placed public schools and the teaching profession in precarious positions. These challenges have been compounded by the COVID-19 pandemic. Within this turbulent context, a school district in partnership with a college of…

A century on from the height of John Dewey's educational writings and the reputation of the Gary Schools Plan as a model of progressive education, the paper reappraises two key matters: the relationship between John Dewey and William Wirt, the first superintendent of the Gary Schools in Gary Indiana, and the coherence between John Dewey's…

This essay examines the school leadership experiences of an infant school head teacher in Birmingham, England, during the Second World War. Drawing on the letters of Dorothy Walker, the essay offers insights into school leadership wartime deprivations. The impact of an international war on the home front was not head teacher Dorothy Walker's only…

International Baccalaureate (IB) Directors of international schools command a paradoxical space of progressive futures, cloaking injustice and whiteness. This is enacted daily through policy, recruitment, teaching and remuneration which privileges the empowered, exploits the marginalised and thereby delivers a critical education of questionable…

In this critical essay, I ask how educational researchers will move beyond repeating critiques of neoliberalism and learn how to address on-the-ground events that disrupt neoliberal policies and practices. By deconstructing neoliberalism, I hope to challenge its fixed and almost transcendent status, and to offer curricular and pedagogical ways of…

While there is a wealth of feminist research on women's educational leadership and policy-making in the interwar years, this article extends the discussion into the Second World War. My focus is the educational leadership of Dorothy Walker, head teacher of St Peter's Infant School and the youngest head teacher in Birmingham, and Lillian de Lissa,…

This article examines citizenship education and pedagogies for learning to be a citizen in the interwar years in Australia. These discussions bore the influence of progressive education and its emancipatory promises. Against this, I explore the "dividing practices" of citizenship education and the ways normative descriptions of the…

This article uses the themes of genesis, metamorphoses, continuity and change from a comparative perspective to show the links and relationships between the ideas of the New Educationists, progressive education and the counter culture of the late 1970s. The article discusses important educationists from different continents and different time…

In this article an attempt is made to examine the continuing implications of the operation and closure of London's Risinghill school, a co-educational comprehensive extant from 1960 to 1965. It is suggested that Risinghill's controversial headteacher, Michael Duane (1915-1997), was an educational celebrity and folk hero amongst teachers and in…