This article explores the ways in which framings drawn from post-structuralism can help to inform the understanding of guidance practices. In particular, it draws upon the later work of Foucault and Actor-Network Theory to question the centrality of the humanistic subject predominant within discourses of contemporary guidance and raise issues of…

Foucault's analysis of unseen power as it operates in discourses that construct "practices of discipline" and "technologies of the self" has been a central conceptual resource in the development of narrative therapy. Narrative therapists take the view that ?unseen aspects of power work to construct both how a person understands their situation,…

College professors often speak of power relations within the university setting in adversarial terms, as a matter of "us", meaning the faculty, versus "them", which usually means all administrators. However, depicting campus administrators as participants in some organized conspiracy against faculty members is unproductive and obscures the fact…

A discussion of democracy is offered that includes historical reactions to the concept, a description of two types of democracy as they appear in the United States contexts. A brief discussion of the contradictions and tensions built into the very core of democracy, and evidence for the corruption of democracy is presented.

This article examines how discourses of leadership reflect and produce particular perceptions about leaders and leadership in higher education. An analysis of 103 articles published by "The Chronicle of Higher Education" between 2002 and 2003 reveal four predominant discourses shaping images of leaders: autonomy, relatedness, masculinity, and…

In this lighthearted article, the author explores how the use of staffroom space can reflect significant hierarchies of power and influence in the school. She contends that who sits where in a staffroom can reflect wider power relations within a school, so understanding this may be a clue as to other ways in which people and groups will interact.

The article explores the issue of teacher autonomy in relation to its potential for freedom or control. It examines the concept of empowerment as applied to education, arguing that, although it is traditionally cast as a means of achieving autonomy, an alternative approach sees empowerment as part of the disciplinary apparatus of late modern…

Research in the ethnography of literacy has led to a stronger focus on literacy as a social practice among researchers and educators. How literacy is ideological and how it is linked to issues of institutional structure and power needs more systematic focus, particularly in the contexts of rapid and unprecedented economic, cultural and…

Religious education takes place within a postmodern culturalintellectual milieu exemplified in part by the work of Michel Foucault, which disrupts common modern concepts of knowledge and power. For Foucault, power is not only repressive but also productive, insofar as every system of knowledge depends on social arrangements of power for the…

The purpose of this investigation was to examine the discourse of evidence-based practice presented in official written documents of the American Speech-Language-Hearing Association. Documents were analyzed with respect to how language was used to convey a sense of certainty about the profession's official position on evidence-based practice, what…

This article elaborates the impact that crises of authority provoked by animal magnetism, mesmerism, and hypnosis in the 19th century had for field formation in American education. Four layers of analysis elucidate how curriculum history's repetitive focus on public school policy and classroom practice became possible. First, the article surveys…

In this article I respond to the analyses of "Educating the 'Right' Way" and "The State and the Politics of Knowledge" that were given by Stephen Ball, Russell Fox and Antonio Novoa. I situate the development of the kinds of argument that these books make, in the larger corpus of my work and in the growth of neoliberal, neoconservative,…

The authors have chosen to move together in examining the issue of social justice because they both struggle with the pedagogical implications of what it means to be in this world. As the authors seek to embody the dialectic process of creating new understandings in their lives, and thus in their classrooms, they seek also to create this through…

This paper synthesizes two perspectives on essentialism: cognitive and social. The cognitive essentialist perspective argues that our bias to appeal to the psychological belief that categories have innate essences enables us to make inferences about social categories such as race, caste, and gender. The social essentialist perspective argues that…

In this article, we revive work redesign theory, specifically Hackman and Oldham's Job Characteristics Model (JCM), to examine distributed leadership initiatives. Based on our early observations of six schools engaged in distributed leadership reform and a broad review of literature, including empirical tests of work redesign theory, we retrofit…