While it has proved a useful concept during the past 20 years, the notion of "critical digital literacy" requires rethinking in light of the fast-changing nature of young people's digital practices. This paper contrasts long-established notions of "critical digital literacy" (based primarily around the critical consumption of…

This paper deals with Chinua Achebe's (1930-2013) "No Longer at Ease" (1960) which depicts the dissemination of English culture in Nigeria and its effects on the life and identity of Obi Okonkwo, the Western educated male protagonist. The focus of this paper is on the dissemination of English culture and submission of Nigerian culture in…

The present paper examines the implementation of a particular human rights education approach--known as "critical hermeneutical" approach--in the context of two Greek-Cypriot classrooms. The study investigates whether and how an intervention grounded in this approach offers transformative possibilities to students and what kind of…

This paper uses the Habermasian concept of legitimation crisis to critique the relationship between post-compulsory education and training and the chronic levels of youth unemployment and under-employment which now characterise post-industrial Western economies, such as the UK. It draws on data from an ethnographic study of the lives of young…

This paper introduces the concept of the phallic teacher, a spectral figure negotiated in teachers' everyday work and in school-based disciplinary communities of practice. Reporting the findings of a 3-year Australian doctoral study completed in 2014, the paper looks closely at how English teachers design both curriculum and identity in an…

This article aims to trace back the history of how Chinese Government attempted to strengthen its national power by learning from the USA, Western Europe and Japan since the mid-nineteenth century, as well as to analyse the influences Westernisation had on the development of China's modern education. In this process, the Chinese Government…

The evangelical discourse makes a claim for online education's essence in connecting it with specific directions in university reform. Critics pick up on this and identify technology with economic rationalization in higher education. But even a brief glance at its history suggests that online education is capable of varying realizations…

Purpose: This paper aims to illustrate how first-generation immigrant youth who are English language learners respond to graphic novels and what literacies they acquire from reading and discussing graphic texts. Design/methodology/approach: This paper is based on qualitative discourse data collected from an afterschool program with five…

The domain and status of work or purposive-rational action in the writings of Jurgen Habermas is highly controversial. Some of his critics accuse him of abandoning the emancipatory potential of non-alienated labor, a central axiom of classic Marxism. This article analyzes his critics' arguments before taking up the influential commentary of Axel…

For several decades education has struggled to find a way out of the entanglement of modernity, the premises and assumptions under which modern education has operated. According to Robin Usher and Richard Edwards, modern education, as the "dutiful child of the Enlightenment," has been "allotted a key role in the forming and shaping…

This article examines the moral, political and pedagogical tensions that are created from the entanglement of patriotism and human rights, and sketches a response to these tensions in the context of critical education. The article begins with a brief review of different forms of patriotism, especially as those relate to human rights, and explains…

In the first three sections of this paper we comment on some of the ideas developed in the forum papers, pointing out possible misunderstandings and constructing new explanations that clarify arguments we made in the original article. In the last section we expand the discussion raised in the original paper, elaborating on the limits of the use of…

Human resource development (HRD) as a scholarly endeavor and as a practice is often criticized in the adult education (AE) literature and by AE scholars as manipulative and oppressive and, through training and other interventions, controlling workers for strictly economic ends (Baptiste, 2001; Cunningham, 2004; Schied, 2001; Welton, 1995). The…

This article advances the enlightened discussion of the nature, logic, and possible effects of the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA). The purpose is to analyse the assumptions regarding how PISA is to achieve its intended effects, that is, to reconstruct PISA's programme theory (PT) and to probe the validity of its underlying…

The practices of mathematics education can be investigated at a wide variety of levels: from the actions of individual students or teachers through classroom interactions, school structures, curriculum specifications and materials, teacher development programmes and local, national or international systems of instruction and assessment. These…