Bourdieu's concept of field offers an alternative explanation for the inevitable gap between policy initiative and implementation. While the existing literature mostly concentrated on the dichotomy of macro- and micro-politics in enacting education policies, the missing attention to meso-level, local governments as policy interpreters and…

Inequalities have historically been conceptualised and empirically explored with primary reference to the human. Both measurements of educational inequalities through the production of data about students, teachers and schools, and ethnographic explorations of inequalities in the spoken accounts of human actors in schools can elide affective…

In England the balance of responsibilities between national and local government for the governance of education is changing. Relationships between schools are shifting and new structures, groups and alliances are being created in response to national policy. The article is part of a project to understand how the new local education landscapes are…

This article draws on the theories of Mezirow, Foucault, and Holland and colleagues to investigate how students were positioned in relation to their own experiences, what opportunities they had to overcome their negative positioning in relation to the power structures that inform the worlds in which they move, and how their changed practices…

'Narrowing the gap' and addressing low educational achievement of specific social class and ethnic groups has long been an expressed government concern. This paper considers the links between poverty, ethnicity and gender and school attainment and the interrelations of these factors using national data sets and other quantitative data. The…

The call to promote social justice sets the social work profession in a political context. In an effort to enhance social workers' preparedness to engage in political advocacy, this article calls on educators to integrate a broad theoretical understanding of power into social policy curricula. We suggest the use of a multidimensional…

The study examines second language identities constructed in small stories around intercultural communication. It presents a detailed narrated-event and narrating-event analysis of small stories narrated by an Iranian user of English as a second language (ESL). The analysis suggests that small stories can become a site where second language…

The higher education sector in Australia is operating in an ideological context in which the ideas of managerialism and neoliberalism combine to create a discourse shaping the lives of both workers and students. The practices that emerge inside higher education organisations as a result combine to form an organisational neoliberal managerial…

This paper comprises findings from three parallel case studies within the broad framework of English for Academic Purposes (EAP). These provide results from classroom-based action research conducted over two years working with Semantics, Specialisation and axiological cosmologies from Legitimation Code Theory (LCT). Each author shares how one or…

Many educational institutions aim to engage students in "global learning" at home and abroad through the process of "internationalization of the curriculum" (IoC). Yet research indicates that students experience and understand IoC in diverse, often unintended ways, and instances of students' diverse perspectives informing IoC…

This article is a discussion of culture circles as they might be employed in public school classrooms to promote humanization and transformational social participation. We suggest culture circles are a medium that teachers might employ toward human becoming and thus aid students in improving their communities through their shared examination of…

Plurilingual approaches to pre-service teacher education hold promise for critical engagement with linguistic, cultural, and racial diversity in equity-supportive ways. Employing critical action research, we as teacher educators implemented an equity-oriented plurilingual approach across three literacy methods courses for pre-service elementary…

To ensure its partners have the capacity to implement gender responsive projects, COL introduced an online training programme on gender equality and women's empowerment. This paper reports the methodology and results in measuring the efficacy of this online training at individual and organisational levels. The ability of individuals and…

Collaborative online learning (COL) has been associated with positive outcomes, such as critical thinking, shared problem-solving skills, and deep learning. Such outcomes require pedagogies that consider students' backgrounds, including the cultural context in which they operate. This study reflects upon the role of culture through the lens of the…

This study explores how a transient community of Chinese visiting scholars in the US negotiates the language norms and identity in the transnational spaces. Transient communities, being different from diasporic stable communities in terms of flexibility and fluidity of movements, are subject to continuous negotiation of social or language norms.…