This article reports on a critical policy analysis of discourses related to school exclusions. The management of problematic student behaviour is one of the intractable problems facing education systems today. Despite being ineffective, school suspensions and exclusions are commonly used in many countries as a discipline strategy to manage student…

This article contributes to the growing debates about the criticality of global education (GE). Our study responds to the critical post/decolonial debates that point out that GE remains complicit in the perpetuation of social inequalities in the world. Contrary to the macro discursive character of those studies that show that GE is complicit in…

This paper revisits and reassesses the influence of the context of production on the origin, development and use of the term 'policy sociology' in research in the sociology of education in the UK from the 1980s to the contemporary period. Starting with the first use of the term 'policy sociology,' and its definition as 'rooted in social science…

Bad student behaviour is argued to be one of the major challenges for schools today. In response to the challenge, there is a strong body of literature aiming at fixing student behaviour. In this paper, we look into professional knowledge discourses regarding 'bad student behaviour,' focusing on one national context, Finland, to explore how…

This paper resists normative definitions of 'creativity' to argue that the concept is constructed by neoliberal discourses in education policy. The analysis is firstly centred on the Australian context, and this is further informed and complimented by a global perspective. Focusing on two pivotal policies, The Melbourne Declaration of Educational…

This article explores the conception of authority relations in the classroom that are implicit in some examples of related policy documentation in Scotland and England. We argue that the importance of the constitutive role of the micro-dynamics of face-to-face interaction in classroom settings is neglected in documentation of this type. We explore…

The focus of this article is the discourse of entrepreneurship education in Sweden. Drawing on a genealogical approach, the analysis draws attention to how this discourse is shaped in the curriculum today, and how it has come to emerge. Focusing on two key events that constitute this discourse, responsibility and problem-solving, and tracing these…

This article explores how early-career teachers working in high-poverty schools in Australia account for their decision-making during critical classroom incidents. Classroom management solutions are problematized by investigating how two teachers take up particular positions, make decisions, and enact what they believe to be 'quality teaching' in…

Students with disruptive behaviour in the Australian state of New South Wales (NSW) are increasingly being educated in separate "behaviour" schools. There is however surprisingly little research on how students view these settings, or indeed the mainstream schools from which they were excluded. To better understand excluded students'…

In Turkey, the social and economic changes of the past couple of decades have facilitated a neoliberal reconstruction of the city and a concomitant reorganisation of its educational spaces. The interaction between the urban space economy and school spaces has been documented by various studies, most of which point to the interplay between…

In the light of some recent transformations in higher education, a moral governance of university teachers is starting to emerge, suggesting a decrease of professional autonomy. By drawing on the idea of Gilles Deleuze's "clinical analysis", the aim of this article is to re-problematize the increasingly common moral image of students'…

This paper examines how international, large-scale skills assessments (ILSAs) engage with the broader societies they seek to serve and improve. It looks particularly at the discursive work that is done by different interest groups and the media through which the findings become part of public conversations and are translated into usable form in…

Similar to many other countries, an educational reform anchored in a managerial discourse was proposed in Israel in 2004 by the Dovrat Committee, encouraged by the "inter-state education gap" social problem that economist Dan Ben-David formulated on the basis of international examinations, such as PISA and TIMMS. Through a neo-Weberian…

Honored by the invitation to read and comment on the papers in this special edition, this final contribution is an appreciation of critical studies in education. This "C" word is dangerous in a neo-liberal world, but as the authors show there is much intellectually practical work that researchers and theorizers are doing. I take my…