Education in rural communities is an interesting site for an analysis of the relationship between place and the cultural politics of schooling. In particular the movements of people, ideas and practices to and from, and also within, rural places suggest the need for theorizing on rural education to consider the relevance of new mobility…

Frederick Douglass's oration, "What to the Slave is the Fourth of July?" is a rhetorical masterwork of irony. It illustrates a strategy for enlisting the liberatory potential inherent in the detached and multiple perspective of irony without allowing that detachment to culminate in political impotence. The speech accomplishes this through opening…

Federal educational legislation in the United States has focused increased attention on the racial achievement gap between minority and majority students. The No Child Left Behind (NCLB) legislation has forced high-stakes accountability in public schools, with the assumption that these policies will create performance pressures on schools to…

This is a study of the abortive attempt by the direct rule Conservative government in the early 1980s to impose unity on the diversity of initial teacher education (ITE) provision in Northern Ireland (NI) through the work of the NI Higher Education Review Group, chaired by Sir Henry Chilver. Harnessing hitherto untapped archives, it shows how…

The British Labour Party has continued to make progress on education, following two broad policy paths and adopting a pragmatic approach that does not attempt to force these to cross or converge. One path is that of the quasi market inherited from the previous Conservative administration; the other is characterised as "intervention" to…

A discourse of marketisation prevails in recent publications on higher education in Ireland. Higher education is urged to heed the call to the markets and to become the driver of Ireland's future economic success, as Ireland seeks to build a knowledge-based economy. This article questions the dominant marketisation discourse in higher education.…

Across the U.S., thousands of schools and universities are in the midst of construction projects that can stall because of unanticipated obstacles. The resulting delays can cause budget contingencies to evaporate and force students and staff in desperate need of more space to bide their time in cramped and inadequate facilities. Problems are bound…

Using a corpus-based approach, this paper investigates the construction of stance in finite reporting clauses with "that"-clause complementation. The data are drawn from two corpora of theses in contrasting disciplines: a social science--politics--and a natural science--materials science. A network for the analysis of reporting clauses is…

During the Second Spanish Republic (1931-1939) the Government identified many of its educational goals with those of the international movement of the New School. While not subscribing to any particular trends, the legal documents are filled with appeals to activism, vitality, work school and collaboration. Many teachers identified with and…

This article deals with the assumptions and implications of the Malaysian policy for "learning from Japan". The article explores the ways in which this policy has effectively been operated in drawing a new geography of "Asia", dislodging colonial legacies in the region and countering the consolidation of other regional blocs.…

This article begins by recalling a recent court case about bullying in a school playground and about how the case was trivialised in certain sections of the media, with much discourse of "political correctness gone mad", and so forth, and of the need for good old-fashioned "common sense". Leaders of teachers' unions took a different view, rightly,…

This article talks about President Bush's aims of seeking accountability in high school as well as other educational goals. President Bush begins the crucial stretch of his bid for a second term with plans to build on the No Child Left Behind Act by expanding educational accountability in the high school grades. Mr. Bush stressed a theme that…

This essay examines a Brooklyn College-based research collective that placed African American languages and cultures at the center of the composition curriculum. Recovering such pedagogies challenges the perception of the CCCC's 1974 "Students' Right to Their Own Language" resolution as a progressive theory divorced from the everyday…

Changes of the shape and the size of higher education systems have been a key issue of both higher education policy and higher education research for more than four decades. It is widely assumed that the expansion of student enrolment was the most powerful factor in evoking structural change and has caused increasing diversification. This article…

Reading First, which has already handed out nearly $5 billion in grants to some 1,700 districts and 5,600 schools, is designed to improve reading instruction in the nation's most disadvantaged schools through the use of research-based methods. However, a report conducted by the investigators for Inspector General John P. Higgins to evaluate…