Over the last few decades, both New Zealand and the intergovernmental organisation of UNESCO have widely spread the rhetoric of safety through a broad range of educational issues. This notion, in vogue since the neoliberal turn, has raised little opposition in educational debates. In this article, we use a Foucauldian lens to analyse the…

New Public Management (NPM)-inspired higher education (HE) governance has become increasingly topical in recent years. However, while existing research provides an overall understanding of relevant changes, it does not offer a complete analysis of complex governance and falls prey to deterministic and relatively narrow ideological impositions.…

While many scholars recognize and criticize the politicization of education policies, scholarly attention to the strategies politicians utilize to politicize educational policy discourses remains limited. Focusing on the officials of Ghana's two major political parties, the New Patriotic Party (NPP) and the National Democratic Congress (NDC), as…

Widening participation in England has been framed around two primary needs; raising attainment and raising aspiration. Whilst aspiration is complex, policy definitions often frame it in narrow economic terms and see access to higher education as primarily about developing a workforce, the underlying logic being that to improve social mobility that…

The aim of this article is to analyze discourse from historically pertinent policy and strategic documents of the Norwegian Schools of Music and Performing Arts, in order to explore the nature of the intractable discrepancy between curriculum, policy, and practice. Popular music has long been part of Norwegian compulsory-school and higher music…

Scholars of political economy have raised the question of whether recent populist movements around the world signal the decline of neoliberal hegemony. What would such a decline mean for education policy, an arena that has been dominated by a neoliberal common sense for several decades? This study investigates the policy discourse of former U.S.…

Grounded in the sense-making literature, this study explores the discourse around and sentiment toward the newly passed Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA) as discussed on the social media platform Twitter. The study explores the characteristics of and connections between users, the content of posts, and the sentiment toward ESSA. Data consisted of…

This paper explores one example of an international comparison -- the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development's International Adult Literacy Survey (IALS) -- in order to investigate the power of numbers in both the shaping and the legitimisation of adult literacy policy using Scotland as a case study. It is argued that policy…

Successive republican governments in France have constructed a complex educational context, which is rhetorically committed to a myth of provision of educational equality of opportunity whilst in practical terms it is characterised by a system focused on the production and reproduction of elites. This article aims to consider the political drivers…

The curriculum is a governance technology of knowledge production and is also itself governed by complex dynamics within European education policy space. This article focuses on how the curriculum is governed by comparative knowledge; in particular, it identifies how this facet of governance has manifested itself within the policy space of…

In 2007, the Malaysia government initiated twinned primary teacher education arrangements with five Southern Hemisphere higher education institutions (HEIs). Participating students completed their teacher education in both Malaysia and a partner HEI. In this paper, we consider the preliminary findings of a comparative study tracking the beginning…

Parent involvement is acknowledged as a crucial aspect of the education of students with special needs. However, the discourse of parent involvement represents parent involvement in limited ways, thereby controlling how and the extent to which parents can be involved in the education of their children. In this article, critical discourse analysis…

The spectre of a food security crisis has raised important questions about future directions for agriculture and given fresh impetus to a long-standing debate about the potential contribution of agricultural biotechnology to food security. This paper considers the discursive foundations for promotion of agricultural biotechnology, arguing that…

This article presents a comparative analysis of two country-specific cases. The comparative analysis is situated within the broad domain of the changing knowledge economy landscape for educational policy. The two cases examine the transfer, embedding and enactment of policies during the interactions between supranational, national, institutional…

This article offers a comparative analysis of the Salamanca Statement and Framework for Action, and the Individuals with Disabilities Education Improvement Act, within a critically discursive framework. The author creates the notion of "possibilities of practice", and analyses each policy document as to how these are created, by means of…