This paper deploys some concepts from the work of Michel Foucault to problematise the mundane and quotidian "practices" of policy translation as these occur in the everyday of schools. In doing that, we suggest that these "practices" are complicit in the formation of and constitution of teacher subjects, and their subjection to…

This paper presents aspects of a small scale study that considered student teachers' language and discourse around race and ethnicity at a university in the northwest of England. The first part of the paper critiques current education-related policy, context and practice to situate the research and then draws upon aspects of critical race theory…

This article proposes a framework for thinking about the ghostly, thus arguing that policy can be understood as a landscape of intersecting and colliding temporalities from which arouse curious workings of barely-there forces, spooky energies and vibrating saturations of affective ambivalences. I present an empirical study of a policy agenda of…

Since 2010, the number of urban Chinese high-school students applying to US universities has rapidly grown. Many of these students have chosen emerging international curriculum programs established by elite public high schools in China. These programs prepare wealthy Chinese students for the US college application process by exposing them to an…

Drawing on a study of education policy enactments in four English secondary schools, this paper argues that different "types" of policies call-up different forms of enactments, and that teachers and others who work in schools will have different orientations towards some of these possible ways of "doing" school. Through…

Recent concern surrounding sports coaches' interaction with young people has reflected a fundamental change in the way coaches and others regard the role of sports. In this paper, we consider the identification and definition of the contemporary sports coach (whether acting in a professional or volunteer capacity) as, in Foucault's term, a…

Several social processes guide and shape how school actors engage with high stakes state and district policies relative to mandated curriculum and instruction. In this article, we use rhetorical argumentation analysis to explore how stakeholders mobilize resources through argumentation and rhetorical appeals (logical, emotional, and…

Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to study circulating power and in/visibility. In the unfolding Maltese education scenario of decentralization and school networking, suffused with entrenched power, with added layers of leadership and more subtle levels of accountability, this paper explores the underlying power relations among the top…

In this article, language policy is analysed in relation to multilingual practices in primary school through an understanding of the policy on different levels--as management, perception and practice. The article is based on longitudinal ethnographic action research that was conducted parallel to local school development. Here we draw on material…

International environmental education policy discourses have influenced policy construction in Botswana and how teachers conduct themselves and teaching in environmental learning. The researcher uses Foucault's notion of governmentality to understand the effects of power/knowledge relations in policy. The analysis is taken further through a…

Leaders of higher education institutions are eager to identify effective internationalization strategies in today's fast-paced, interconnected global environment. International academic partnerships are a common yet understudied strategy designed to take advantage of globalization's opportunities and to meet an institution's internationalization…

Background/Context: Critical education studies tries to make sense of the relationship between education and differential power in an unequal society and to what degree schools impact the social order. A premise in this field is that a fundamental aim of critical education is exposing unequal social, cultural, and economic power relations and…

From an ethnographic case study of a state-funded residential school for the Deaf, the authors employed Critical Discourse Analysis to identify competing discourses in the talk of educators. These discourses are embedded in the historical oppression and labeling of deaf people as disabled and the development of Deaf culture as a counter-discourse.…

Based on years of observation at a large state university, "Wannabe U" tracks the dispiriting consequences of trading in traditional educational values for loyalty to the market. Aping their boardroom idols, the new corporate administrators at such universities wander from job to job and reductively view the students there as future workers in…

This article reports on year-long critical ethnographic study conducted in a Singapore school and examines how the standard English language educational policy is interpreted by a Secondary 3 (Grade 9) female student from China. She is a member of an exclusive group of academically able students who has been carefully recruited by the local…