Academic careers are social processes which involve many members of large populations over long periods of time. This paper outlines a discursive perspective which looks into how academics are categorized in academic systems. From a discursive view, academic careers are organized by categories which can define who academics are (subjectivation)…

Through close analyses of the interaction that takes place between students and facilitators, this study investigates the instructional use of video in post-simulation debriefings. The empirical material consists of recordings of 40 debriefings that took place after simulation-based training scenarios in health care education. During the…

Teaching Excellence Awards have raised the profile of teaching as a scholarly project. There are however a number of questions about what constitutes teaching excellence and how "excellence" is understood in current higher education. In a post-colonial South Africa, where significant injustices permeate our society, we question whether…

The national curriculum reformers, regarded as members of the social elites and intellectuals, projected their vision of identity onto the curriculum which they constructed and influenced the next generation's national consciousness. In the tangled relationship between politics and education, the selection of the reformers in a sense dictates the…

Improving the quality of education for young people growing up in high poverty and culturally diverse communities is an escalating problem in affluent nations with increasing gaps between the wealthy and the poor. Improving the quality of teachers and improving the quality of teaching are amongst the prominent solutions offered to redress the…

The aim of this article is to show how the European Union (EU) and the Swedish government have recently become co-producers of education policy that increasingly emphasises compulsory education. The paper draws on the following two kinds of empirical material: 1) an analysis of central official policy documents produced by the EU and the Swedish…

With the increasing casualisation of the teacher labour force, there is little written on the experiences of casual teachers and the challenges they face in brokering professional identities within constantly shifting and uncertain work contexts. Being a category bound casual teacher (a product of category boundary work) is a complex subject…

Learner agency, the capability of individual human beings to make choices and act on these choices in a way that makes a difference in their lives (Martin, 2004), is instrumental in second language learning because attainment is only arrived at by learner choice (Pavlenko & Lantolf, 2000). If attainment is understood as learner engagement in…

The question of physical interaction is especially relevant in school physical education, where a lot of the teaching and activities are based on body movements. However, the issue of "touching" has been questioned in recent years. This paper takes its starting point in the discourse of child protection and the growing anxiety around…

This article is based on part of the discourse data collected from a 5-month ethnographic study about how first-year learners of English as a second language (ESL) socially interact with their native-speaking peers in a college town in the U.S. Midwest. The data were collected from participant observation at an art exhibition at the research site.…

Student voice is a difficult concept to capture in research. This study attempts to provide a vehicle for understanding student perceptions about writing and writing instruction through a case study supported by discourse analysis of student talk. The high school students in this study participated in interviews and focus groups about their…

Examining post-election statements made by UC System, UT-Austin, and UW-Madison executive leadership, this study employs word frequency, collocation, and a three-pronged latent semantic analysis to explicate the associative diction, major concepts, and institutional priorities expressed by said leadership to answer the research question,…

This paper situates recent changes in educational policymaking, especially the increased use of the ballot initiative, within larger historical trends related to democratic engagement in policy development. I conduct an integrative literature review that combines conceptual analyses with findings from empirical investigations into new policymaking…

An analytical appraisal of key documents on Ghana's education suggests that her post-independence education policy has evolved from predominantly socialist and social democratic ideals towards neo-liberal and capitalist ideological policy direction over time. This article traces and documents this discursive shift in Ghana's education policy…

Academic Language and Learning (ALL) is a relatively recent practice field known in Australian Higher Education as Academic Skills Advising or Student Support. Changing social, political and economic circumstances shape ALL work in complex and contradictory ways. Of crucial current significance are discourses calling for education to become an…