The biggest threat to an equitable and prosperous American society is not a particular educational policy, but the gravitational pull of politics, explains Jonathan Collins. Before educational policy can be developed and put into place, the politics that drive education must be acknowledged and addressed. Violence is erupting at school board…

This article introduces an analytic strategy or thinking tool called the 'What's the Problem Represented to be?' (WPR) approach and suggests its usefulness for reflecting on important debates in music education. First developed as a mode of policy analysis, WPR has since been adopted in many fields and topic areas. The WPR approach consists of…

This article presents an analysis of the Dutch field of education by drawing on interviews and observations from long-lasting relationships with experts in the field. Studying how these "key players" discuss the educational field, we explore how the lack of effective solutions may be related to the ways in which leading educational…

Misinterpretations and caricatures of Critical Race Theory (CRT) abound in popular media and in higher education scholarship. Given the confusion surrounding what CRT is and is not, I write this conceptual essay as an invitation to engage seriously with CRT's legal foundations. I offer four guideposts to aid scholars in engaging the legal roots of…

In interactive e-learning environments such as Intelligent Tutoring Systems, pedagogical decisions can be made at different levels of granularity. In this work, we focus on making decisions at "two levels": whole problems vs. single steps and explore three types of granularity: "problem-level only" ("Prob-Only"),…

Wales is often compared favourably to other countries because of its commitment to the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child and lower levels of school exclusions. Systematic analysis of policy documents reveals the dominance of a rights-based discourse in approaching the challenge of school exclusions, which are explained in terms of…

Since 2007, two taxonomies have been proposed to identify the components of evaluation practice that may be specified in an evaluation policy. Little is known, however, about how these taxonomies align with evaluation policies developed by philanthropic foundations. Through thematic analysis, this article first compares 12 foundation evaluation…

Australia has no national approach to climate change education, neither for primary, secondary, or tertiary education nor for the informal and community adult education sectors. Inaction has its roots in Australian politics reluctant to engage with scientific evidence or community experience of extreme weather events and hamstrung by the political…

With a forward-looking and problem-solving mindset, this article aims to combine theoretical knowledge and empirical evidence from different schools of thought in the field of second language (L2) learning and teaching--namely, instructed second language acquisition, generative linguistics, and an ecological perspective that includes multiple…

In this article, I propose the need to reimagine global citizenship education for a VUCA world: volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous. In this context, it remains unclear what kind of GCE could adequately prepare young people for numerous overlapping global challenges. Most responses to this conjuncture suggest that we revise our…

This paper examines and compares national policies on school exclusion, using a specific framework for public policy analysis developed by Carol Bacchi [(2009). Analysing policy: What's the problem represented to be? Frenchs Forest: Pearson]. This framework is known as 'What's the problem represented to be?' or 'WPR'. Bacchi's framework has been…

Policy can present any number of wicked problems for arts educators and advocates. The complexity of policy accompanied by a general lack of policy dexterity fuels the legitimacy gap between advocacy arguments and policy implementation and, thus, weakens the arts in the education policy realm. To help close the gap, common weak arguments in policy…

In this essay, we contend that there continues to be a lack of attentiveness in educational leadership and policy to addressing how critical educators "emotionally" navigate social and political issues generally, and racism particularly--both of which are emotional issues. As such, using brief examples of reflections from critical…

For over two decades the radical critique of society and culture has had an important impact on educational-pedagogical thought and has had a central role in promoting the discussion of 'social justice' in educational leadership literature. This paper aims to present the principle tenets of the radical critique of society and culture in social…

In John Raven's "Diving in Where Angels Fear to Tread: Pre-Requisites to Evidence-Based Interventions," he outlines several critical failings in which social scientists bear a responsibility for potentially a great deal of damage toward children, society, and notably, the planet itself. The nature of the damage appears to be one of…