This paper is an attempt to think aloud about the current policy proposals in circulation in England that address pre-service teacher education. Rather than dealing with details of policy and points of specificity in practice, the focus of this paper is with how propositions are justified and the overall ways in which meanings are being managed; a…

Early childhood teachers in Aotearoa New Zealand negotiate their personal professional identities within the context of a nationally organised and regulated education sector. Early childhood teaching has become increasingly professionalised. Emphasis on qualifications and professional standards has constrained possible ways of being early…

The author argues that Michael Polanyi's philosophy of science can be understood as an (unconscious) attempt to recapture elements of experience largely forgotten or repressed in modernity. Specifically, the author argues that Polanyi's epistemology appears to draw on elements of oral-aural experience that have been relatively ignored by the…

This article shows how equity research in mathematics education can be decentered by reporting the "voices" of mathematically successful African American male students as they recount their experiences with school mathematics, illustrating, in essence, how they negotiated the White male math myth. Using post-structural theory, the…

The work of teachers is subject to changing not only policies and reforms but also the complexities and contradictions of societal transformations. This paper examines teachers' perceptions of the impact of post-Soviet transformations on teacher collaboration amid the changing education policies and reforms in Ukraine. Drawing on qualitative…

Post-structuralism, a theory of signs for written texts, would seem an obvious resource for a field like Composition Studies that has "writing" at its center. Yet the post-structuralist turn in Composition Studies is hamstrung by the deep division between camps in the field that are committed to political critique on the one hand or to…

The purpose of this research was to describe the experiences of six women superintendents who began their careers as elementary principals. The central question was: What can we learn from the lived experience of women who came from a background as elementary educators and advanced to the superintendency in a variety of district contexts within…

This article examines the dynamic between expressions of care--that is, simple acts of kindness and consideration that make up friendly relations--and professional expertise. During the 20th century, social work based its expertise on a solid scientific foundation. Within the embrace of scientific expertise, expressions of care are assigned the…

During this article, I look at three images of thought which feature in Deleuze and Guattari's "A Thousand Plateaus" and consider their relevance to contemporary pedagogy. Deleuze and Guattari begin by discussing tree-like thought, which involves an insular depiction of the world. I suggest that the performative apparatus, which structures…

This article analyses how Finnish vocational teachers make sense of the meanings of gender in their work. The context of the study consists of the two most gender segregated environments of vocational education: the female-dominated Sector of Health and Social Services and the male-dominated Sector of Technology and Transport. Our analysis draws…

Since the seventeenth century, there have been two narratives about modernity in general and America in particular. The author uses the term "narrative" to include (a) facts, (b) arguments, and most important, (c) a larger vision of how one sees the world and chooses to engage the world. The first and originalist narrative is the Lockean Liberty…

In this article, I deconstruct the concept of understanding in mathematics education, examining how it is spoken into being and what work it does for primary school student teachers. I use poststructural analysis to unpack interviews with a student teacher, Jane, drawn from a larger longitudinal study. I show how she negotiates tensions between…

Dynamic Assessment (DA) is a postmodern notion in testing which sees instruction and assessment as inextricably mingled contending that learners will progress if provided with dynamic interactions. The main purpose of the study is to see if the scores generated by the computerized dynamic assessment (C-DA) which is grounded in Vygotsky's…

The processes of gaining consent for educational and social research with children and young people have become increasingly complex. A variety of influences contribute to this complexity. In this paper, we use post-structural concepts to focus on the influence of three co-existing and interweaving perspectives: protectionist, participatory and…

Traditionally cooking is considered to be women's work, yet the vast majority of professional chefs, particularly in the upper echelons of restaurant work, are men. These curious gendered patterns stimulated interest in delving more deeply into the gendered nature of restaurant work. Existing research on this topic has concentrated on the front of…