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…

Scholars writing on agency argue that normally, individuals who experience social structures as comfortable will tend to want to reproduce them while those who experience these structures as oppressive will want to change them. This is a bleak outlook because it suggests that those in positions of power and influence are less likely to seek to…

Nowadays in Japan, people's social existence may become less well defined as changes are brought about by social shifting. Japan is simply shifting from a society model based on an industrial society to another model, so-called a consumer society. In terms of social structure, this means shifting from the idea of society and economy assuming the…

In this paper, the author demonstrates how education is presented by Freire as the key both for changing society and leading people toward true humanity. The author's interest is not to further develop the method that Freire elaborated in the sixties and seventies, but, rather, to show the degree to which his theory is coherent with his vision of…

Graduation and retention rates for men in higher education are falling while instances of violence against women on campus are rising. This environment has produced a focused effort to stem the tide of violence against women in college and a desire to restore men to previous levels of academic achievement. The authors commend and support these…

The field of early childhood education is increasingly dominated by a strongly positivistic and regulatory discourse, the story of quality and high returns, which has spread from its local origins in the favourable environment provided by a global regime of neoliberalism. But though dominant, this is not the only discourse in early childhood…

In this postcolonial inquiry, we analyze how spirituality has been simultaneously appropriated/re-covered and re-appropriated/recovered for the purpose of (re)colonizing as well as decolonizing projects. By drawing from discrete yet interconnected literatures of decolonizing, (post)(anti)colonial, Indigenous, and ethnic studies based theories, we…

In common with a number of recent studies of religious change that have taken a gendered approach, this article takes older women as its focus and considers the role the emotions play in religious change, adopting Riis and Woodhead's new conceptual framework of religious emotion. Emotions, they argue, are not merely private, personal and…

The major priorities that should guide leadership education in preparing leaders for their work of leading schools in a democratic society are: (1) Teaching leaders to understand the inequities of society; (2) Teaching leaders to serve as agents for social transformation; and (3) Teaching leaders to help each and every student learn and succeed.…

Examines trends in participatory research and the need for clarification of it as a process of "disindoctrination" to the status quo and a means of bringing about the structural transformation of society. Issues of popular organization and strategies for increasing viability are discussed. (SK)

Traditional society, viewed as static with little differentiation or specialization as well as low levels of urbanization and literacy, and modern society, characterized as having thorough differentiation, urbanization, literacy, and exposure to mass media, are examined in situations of change as different models of social and political order…

Urges community college leaders to adopt a dialectical approach to the analysis of the impact of community colleges on the lives of individuals and the structure of society. Suggests research into changes in political and social attitudes of faculty and reviews Gouldner's post-Marxist analysis of class structure and struggle. (DMM)

Concludes that the real challenge to social scientists in this administration, and any other, is not how to relate effectively and get more funds from the executive branch, but how to relate more effectively as teachers and learners in the political process--with the American people and their elected representatives in Congress. (Author/JM)

After reviewing the historical and legal background of race relations in South Africa, the author reviews his experiences at a recent conference on Accelerated Development in Southern Africa,'' held in Johannesburg. (JM)