This paper examines fundamental assumptions about the notion of transforming subject matter, which is widely regarded as a core practice of teacher work, a crucial feature of teacher knowledge and a measure of teacher expertise. First, the notion of transforming subject matter and the ways it has been taken up in Anglo-American discourses of…

In international comparative research on adult education, typologies such as the 'Varieties of Capitalism' approach are applied frequently to justify country-based research designs, or to frame research results. However, the advantage of typologies in reducing institutional complexity becomes a drawback when it comes to explain variations between…

This dissertation examines the expansion of refugee student services in postwar France during three subsequent refugee crises involving students from Eastern Europe. More than just a product of Franco-Soviet Cold War relations, I show how French support for the students developed in the context of decolonization and contemporary migration politics…

The literature regarding the social organisation of 'adult' learning opportunities throughout the life course postulates different significations of policy concepts such as 'lifelong education', 'permanent education', 'recurrent education', and 'lifelong learning' in the 1970s. This paper examines policy formation processes in France during the…

When the Faure report was published in 1972, the Soviet Union already had a robust and holistic cradle-to-grave, lifewide, lifelong education (LLE) system in place. Parts of this system and some of its ideology were reflected in the Faure report, thanks in large part to the contribution of one of the commissioners and authors, Arthur Petrovsky,…

In Bourdieusian theory, the use of so-called 'legitimate' language serves to maintain dominant power structures, with 'legitimacy' determined by an array of economic and social conditions inherent in speech communities. Standard languages function as normalised products and are imbued with a greater degree of legitimacy than non-standard varieties…

The purpose of the paper is to develop the theory that structural or procedural changes in institutions precede changes in education in a society. It examines the development of pre-modern institutions in Western Europe in the 16th and 17th centuries and the influences this had on growth in literacy rates within these states. Literacy rates in…

In this article, the author outlines some of the defensive weapons with which schools fight to hold their institutional authority over knowledge in a changing educational landscape. If schools are gripped by a crisis of epistemic authority, what are their strategies of shoring up their jurisdiction? To explore this question, the author turns to…

Context: Existing studies have explored the association between workplace training and wages suggesting that training participation may have a positive association with wages. However, we still know very little about whether this association varies between men and women. Through its potential positive association with wages, training may balance…

Explanatory typologies have recently experienced a renaissance as a research strategy for constructing and assessing causal explanations. However, both the new methodological works on explanatory typologies and the way such typologies have been used in practice have been affected by two shortcomings. First, no elaborate procedures for assessing…

In a society where the politics of life is geared toward maximizing the physical and psychological dimensions of human capital to ensure economic growth, France's Inspectorate for Youth and Sports played a key role in disseminating a new mode of governance of bodies and youth--a form of self-governance based on the rising neoliberal values that…

This article draws primarily on a dataset of 60 semi-structured interviews conducted with teachers working in English and French state-funded secondary schools. Informed by feminist sociological theories of work and education and a cross-national comparative perspective, it explores the mechanisms leading to the production of gender inequalities…

In the present paper, we discuss the time before the "age of reports". Besides the Coleman Report in the period of Coleman, the Lady Plowden Report also appeared, while there were important studies in France (Bourdieu & Passeron, 1964; Peyre, 1959) and studies that inaugurated comprehensive education in Nordic countries. We focus on…

Context: Vocational education and training (VET) is expected to be designed for creating learning outcomes which meet the needs for skills and competences in the labour market. Hence, identifying current and upcoming skill requirements and ensuring that these requirements are incorporated into education has long been the subject of academic and…

The definition and goals of education are mercurial, varying widely across time and space. In Cambodia, which has experienced both flux and reflux over time, education--particularly in schools--has strongly reflected the political circumstances of the time. Education as a fundamental human right is a very new idea: it was, and still is to a…