By exploring the tensions, impacts, and origins of major controversies relating to schooling and curricula since the early twentieth century, this insightful text illustrates how fear has played a key role in steering the development of education in the United States. Through rigorous historical investigation, Evans demonstrates how numerous…

The United States has, for the last generation, been going through a significant and highly contested period of change in its schools. A bipartisan consensus around a reform agenda of accountability and choice was rolled out nationwide, with promises of closing achievement gaps and raising standards, all without the infusion of new resources. This…

In July of 2015 the General Assembly of Connecticut enacted House Bill 6919, which effectively established a task force concerning outcomes based financing for higher education. This task force would convene meetings discussing performance based funding (PBF) with the end goal of adopting this policy, which nationally had already been done by over…

In this essay, the author uses experiences as a teacher educator and learning from a historically significant activism movement to (a) compare values in activism-centered and education-centered organizations, (b) posit ways that the concept of neutrality weakens academic activism, and (c) call for teacher education curricula and practices that…

Research that explores ethics can help educational communities engage twenty-first century crises and work toward ecologically and socially just forms of life. Integral to this research is an engagement with social theory, which helps educators imagine our shared worlds differently. In this paper I present two theoretical-methodological directions…

Feminist historians have long argued that women have been absent from history, and recovering their position in the historical discourse has been one of the main projects of academic feminism for the last 40 years. But while women's marginal position as historical subjects has been recognized and addressed their actual contribution to the…

First, I review the context for the need of new deliberative models, specifically agonistic deliberative models, for public discourse and for use in training students for public discourse. I then highlight five specific points that I trouble and enrich, principally through the work of Giroux, Arendt, Biesta, and Duarte. While I agree that there is…

In a series of recent papers, Nick Zepke has criticised those researching student engagement in higher education for uncritically supporting neoliberalism. The current highly politicised nature of higher education means that clarity about the political implications of engagement research is crucial. This conceptual paper argues that in focusing on…

For some scholars and commentators, the era of globalisation represented a new border-less age. However, the continuing legacy of colonial expansion through contemporary forms of imperialism and mass movement of migrants and refugees, has ensured that, in today's globalised world, the relevance of the border is growing, not declining. Indeed, the…

In this article, I utilize an indisciplinary theoretical framework through the work of Jacques Rancière to examine the artwork of artists with mental disabilities experiencing confinement in asylums in the late 19th to early 20th centuries. I further examine preexisting ways in which this artwork, focusing particularly on the Prinzhorn Collection,…

The responses which can be given to the questions about whether education and teachers' roles and practices in the classroom have a political context and these responses are not independent of the way we make sense of education and politics. Therefore, the responses of the prospective teachers to these questions will also contribute to their…

Drawing on the aesthetic theory of Jacques Rancière and the Lacanian conception of lack, this paper offers an intervention into the notion of subjectivity which can be applied in critical studies of education. Critiquing the progressive and knowledge-oriented ideology of neoliberal systems, Rancière depicts a world in which politics turns out to…

States have increasingly used ballot initiatives to legislate education policy in recent years, although the consequences for educational equity and justice have been underexamined. This article investigates the extent to which ballot initiatives disproportionately affect traditionally minoritized students, with particular attention to two…

Hydraulic fracturing ('fracking'), like other complex social and environmental issues, is a controversy about science which raises educational questions about how best to prepare young people to understand, respond to and, where necessary, act (or not) in response. It raises political questions. We present a state-of-the-art review of research…

This article discusses the expression of neoliberalism in Kazakhstan's emerging higher education system. The central tenets of neoliberalism are briefly articulated. Noted is the phenomenon that the general political-economic paradigm of neoliberalism differs in its specific implementation depending on the particular countries and cultures in…