A fundamental question lies at the heart of the issues surrounding the connections between educational projects and larger socially critical movements and projects. What would a socially just education system look like? In answering this, one place immediately comes to mind, a locale where this question was answered through real transformations:…

Jim Garrison's article (Garrison 2012) critiques current reforms in the United States for fostering a harmful "standardization" in schooling, which threatens to further undermine the country's democratic heritage and to prepare many students for servitude in an oppressive social order. John Dewey is cited throughout, as befits Professor…

How can one country narrow the regional disparity during the tremendous expansion of higher education? This issue remains unexamined and critical analysis is needed to unveil the spatial dynamics behind expansion of higher education. The spatial analysis shows that there is significant strategic interaction among neighboring provinces in China…

Susan Price's "Odin Trilogy" (2005-2008) is a juvenile science fiction series that depicts a future where class relations have become polarised due to late capitalist and technological developments and where ways of doing gender continue to be strongly connected with class. The society in the novels is based on slavery: people are either…

This article excavates how style in writing was represented and taught in the under-investigated mid-twentieth century. I trace four editions of the textbook "Modern Rhetoric" (1949-1979), authored by Cleanth Brooks and Robert Penn Warren; I detail how the book was surprisingly innovative for the time, despite its eventual re-entrenchment to a…

In Someone Has to Fail, Labaree (2010) offers an admirably concise overview of the history and promise of education reform in the United States, combining insights from the history of education, policy studies, and a refreshingly accurate and nuanced account of what it is like to actually manage a classroom environment. While in this essay we…

Long before the earthquake in Haiti on 12 January 2010, but particularly since, international media and humanitarian groups have drawn attention to the "vulnerable child" in Haiti, a child often portrayed as needing "saving". Focusing in particular on the "restavek" (child domestic laborer), this article first…

This paper begins from a position of critique of the dominant neo-liberal, human capital framing of education policy today. However, unlike most critiques of this kind, the paper argues that schooling's role in the preparation of workers and consumers is nonetheless important. Education does, of necessity, have economic purposes. To this end, the…

In a recent book chapter, Matthew Thompson makes some criticisms of my work, including the interpretive approach to religious education and the research and activity of Warwick Religions and Education Research Unit. Against the background of a discussion of religious education in the public sphere, my response challenges Thompson's account,…

In this article, we have traced some of the dominant cultural narratives shaping current understandings of youth crime and suicide. We have aimed to show some of the ways that our received understandings of what the problem is and what should be done about it are social constructions that privilege a certain kind of scientific explanation. By…

Students must learn content knowledge and develop scientific literacy skills to evaluate and use scientific information in real-world situations. Recognizing the accessibility of scientific information to the average citizen, we developed an instructional approach to help students learn how to judge the quality of claims. We describe a…

Corpus linguistics, or the gathering together of language into a body for analysis and development of materials, is claimed to be an assured, established method (or field) that valuably informs pedagogical materials and knowledge of language (e.g. Ädel 2010; Gardner & Nesi, 2013). The fundamental validity of corpus linguistics is rarely, if…

This paper argues that narratives, specifically literature and memoir, offer a way to build empathy and understanding by moving readers to deeper levels of text interpretation and critique. The paper examines a new literacy framework, Life Histories, that uses talk, collaboration, writing, and performance to understand the complex relationships…

The use of the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) across nations, cultures, and languages has been criticized. The key criticisms point to the linguistic and cultural biases potentially underlying the design of reading comprehension tests, raising doubts about the legitimacy of comparisons across economies. Our research focused…

This paper uses the introduction of critical pedagogy to an English as a Foreign Language class in the Republic of Korea as a case study for a "modest critical pedagogy" (Tinning 2002). Focusing on the stress and resistances experienced during the introduction, we suggest a modest critical pedagogy that 1) makes the paradigm itself an…