In recent years, the Danish education context has seen an increased concern about underperforming students with migratory histories (particularly students perceived as non-Western descendants) in the political and pedagogical discourses. There seem to be some historical tensions between the societal expectation of class mobility through education…

There has been a rapid global expansion of English instruction in the early grades in public school curricula. Particularly in so-called developing countries, the increase of and its shift from exclusively private to public education is linked to the idea that acquiring English promotes personal, social, and economic development. The author takes…

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,…

Curriculum reforms provide a unique opportunity to investigate how in times of social change education is not only influenced by, but also itself a driver of, competition and inequality. This article sheds light on a specific instance of how macro-societal patterns in education intermingle in twenty-first century Turkey by inquiring into a major…

This article addresses an enduring concern in the sociology of education: how social class differences are reproduced through schooling. In particular it focuses on the functioning of pedagogy in this regard. The article presents a model that elucidates the inner logic of pedagogy in order to reveal the structuring of inequality with respect to…

Preschool and kindergarten programs for poor and middle-class children fell into three types: (1) didactic programs, which stressed academic skills and had relatively negative social environments; (2) child-centered programs, which deemphasized academic skills and had positive social environments; and (3) intermediate programs, which fell between…

This is an intensive observational study of teacher behavior in six kindergartens in three schools. The schools were picked to be typical examples of a white middle class suburban school, an integrated lower class urban school, and a black lower class urban school. In all three schools teachers used the greatest proportion of class time (from 33…