This study inquires how students of Arab heritage in an urban setting in Denmark interpret Islamic literacy artefacts available in their homes, and how these interpretations reflect broader faith literacy practices in the students' diaspora community. Through a linguistic ethnographic study design students have been invited to photograph literacy…

Critical policy analysis examining how powerful actors use educational policies to reproduce unequal social structures presents many challenges. These challenges are amplified by the politics of spectacle, where duplicity comes to dominate how educational policies are conceptualized, presented to the public, and subsequently enacted. The pursuit…

This paper seeks to further conceptualise participation in International Large-Scale Assessment (ILSA) as a global ritual of belonging and apply it to understand the appeal of PISA for Development (PISA-D) in Ecuador and Paraguay. The paper develops the theoretical underpinnings of the global ritual of belonging through policy borrowing and…

International organisations facilitated the spread of competency-based reforms around the world. Accepting at face value correlations between students' performance on international assessments, such as PISA, and nations' economic development, reformers in different countries began to adopt competency-based standards to improve the quality of…

This paper has two aims: to introduce readers to Bernstein's concept of languages of description, interpreted through the lens of ethnography; and to demonstrate the value of this approach to theory-making by showing how a qualitative study conducted on these principles led to new explanations for gender differences in literacy attainment that can…

Meta-ethnography and systematic review of qualitative research are needed but also challenged by the link to the evidence movement's models and PISA-traditions for measuring learning effects. For reflections on the perspective for meta-ethnography it means to reconstruct the methodological argument almost divided in a "Before and After…

The article examines two key concepts in research on policy borrowing and lending that are often used to explain why and how educational reforms travel across national boundaries: reception and translation. The studies on reception analyse the political, economic, and cultural reasons that account for the attractiveness of a reform from elsewhere.…

The results of PISA studies over recent years have revealed the social selectivity of the scholastic education system. Based on my empirical research on families with mentally ill parents, I show how, for the children involved, social exclusion begins before they even start school. I also show how parents' mental illness is seen to affect…

The global neoliberal context and the emergence of new forms of 'governance by numbers' is now recognized as a ubiquitous educational phenomenon. In this context, large-scale assessments such as are used to justify marketised ideals of education that rely on comparison by numbers. In Australia, one of the key arguments for large scale standardised…

Interreligious dialogue is a central objective in European and UNESCO policy and research documents, in which educational institutions are seen as central places for dialogue. In this article, we discuss this type of dialogue under the conditions of asymmetry and categorisation in two Finnish schools. Finnish education has often been lauded for…

Background: In educational policies, two discourses on gender have existed since the 1980s. I call them the "gender equality discourse" and the "boy discourse". The gender equality discourse in education is based on international and national declarations and plans, and is focused predominantly on the position of girls and…

The aim of this article is to examine teachers' constructions of the literacy competence levels of multilingual students. The study is based on a Latour-inspired theoretical understanding of standardised literacy testing as a social practice, and focuses on teachers' perceptions of and practices concerning compulsory national standardised literacy…

Autoethnography is adopted as the procedure and orientation for this PhD study which aims to explore the cultural identity of the Chinese families and its influences on their children's mathematics learning. The purpose of this paper is two-fold. First, readers are invited to travel with the researcher a journey in which she explores her diasporic…

The need for innovation in the Spanish educational system has become more evident in the wake of the last PISA reports. To find our own way to achieve better schools we "must" take advantage of what schools that managed to sustain changes over time have learnt from such a process. This paper reports on findings from an inquiry that tried…

This article considers the role of research in disentangling an increasingly complex relationship between literacy policy and practice as it is emerging in different local and national contexts. What are the tools and methodologies that have been used to track this relationship over time? Where should they best focus attention now? In answering…