Within the last decades, a new way of policymaking has become increasingly prominent: civic hackathons. However, in education policy research, hackathons have not been broadly addressed so far. With this article, we contribute to closing this research gap by empirically investigating the educational #wirfürschule (#wfs) Hackathons that took place…

This article applies system theory to the analysis of the relationship between the EU and candidate country Serbia, with a focus on adult education policy. The study explores how the peripheral status of Serbia with its hybrid political regime combining autocratic and democratic features leads to the hybridisation of its adult education system,…

This study explores the production, dissemination, and reception of the discourse of educational excellence and internationalisation in Japan's Designated National University Corporation System. The study frames the policy initiative within the longstanding goals of the Japanese government and demonstrates how the work of Michel Foucault helps…

Education is the pillar of social development. Higher education in particular teaches how to develop critical thinking and problem-solving skills. For the better opportunities of tomorrow, forward-looking nations formulate inclusive education policies today. However, it is not uncommon to see authoritarian regimes control knowledge production and…

This study interrogates how one of the least-studied regional intergovernmental organisations, the African Union (AU), operationalises or recontextualises the global Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) in the process of developing its post-2015 education and development strategies. Employing critical discourse analysis and drawing on…

While reference societies as an "externalization" process are often used to justify borrowing policies from abroad, a concerted attempt to understand how "power" influences this process, particularly regarding "semiperipheral" references to the periphery, remains absent. This article explores the externalization…

This paper discusses the workings of the European Semester (ES) in relation to the policy field of education. My study shows how the ES enables the steering of education policy through encouraging specific economic and employment-related actions by European Union (EU) member states. With a focus on the relationship between the EU institutions and…

After the fall of the communist regime, Romania launched the first multi-systemic reform in the education sector in 1995. The reform was largely financed through a World Bank loan and closely followed the neo-liberal ideology promoted by Bank officials. It aimed to privatize and to implement private sector management principles in the public…

In response to a proposal to reframe the 'research into practice' agenda in UK education using partnership working, this paper examines a type of collaborative research known as a research-practice partnership (RPP), drawing on models established in education in the United States. It examines their characteristics and what has been learnt from…

This article performs a discourse analysis on the recent interest of the Israeli Ministry of Education in vocational education by examining governmental and organisational texts. This article addresses two key questions. What is the government's justification for its renewed interest in vocational education? What are its discursive practices to…

This study comparatively examines state policies of university autonomy in the Eastern Neighborhood countries of the European Union, with a particular focus on Georgia, Ukraine, and Moldova. Guided by the principles outlined in the 2007 Lisbon Declaration, the research investigates how university autonomy is shaped by state policies in these three…

The literature on initial teacher education highlights a crisis facing teacher educators, one which threatens our own epistemic legitimacy and relevance in educational discourses, as market-economy mandates and political surveillance intensify and dominate what it means to be and do teacher education. Given this macro-level concern, we, as teacher…

The reduction in local control and oversight of schooling represented by the growth of Multi Academy Trusts (MATs) in England raises critical issues for public policy. These include the articulation and exercise of power in the governance of MATs, the future of democratic governance of local services and accountability. Applying Foucault's…

This article draws on the case of conflict-affected and multilingual Cameroon to analyze how education materials address national unity and multilingualism amidst an identity crisis fueled by tensions between Anglophones and a central government accused of favoring Francophones. Through a discourse analysis of one policy document, 13 curricula,…

This study critically examines gender equality planning (GEP), which has been obligatory in all Finnish comprehensive schools since 2015. GEP has been welcomed as a promising method of systemizing perspectives on gender in Finnish basic education. A regionally representative, discretional sample of gender equality plans (N = 140) was analysed…