One of the most powerful ways to boost the payoff from school sports lays in helping coaches build developmental relationships with student-athletes. Developmental relationships are close connections through which young people develop character skills to discover who they are, gain the ability to shape their own lives, and learn how to interact…

In this short essay, I explore in a narrative style the following question: do narrative analyses of sport and exercise need to engage more fully with social theory in order to become more forceful in their arguments? More specifically, to have real impact, and to achieve what we are especially trained to do as qualitative social scientists,…

In this reflective article that straddles the personal and the professional, the author shares his critical thoughts on the impact of the steady stream of discourse on the native speaker/nonnative speaker (NS/NNS) inequity in the field of TESOL. His contention is that more than a quarter century of the discoursal output has not in any significant…

This is a very difficult time in education. Neoliberal and neoconservative policies have had major effects on schools, on communities, on administrators, on teachers, and on all school staff. A new alliance has integrated education into a wider set of ideological commitments. The objectives in education are the same as those that guide economic…

This article examines the relationship between authority and music. It starts with the proposition that music--as an art or an educative enterprise in Western environs--remains a highly idealized enterprise and this idealization creates an alibi for action that is characteristically narrow and guided by authority. Schmidt claims that authority is…

Analyzing how some names grant and reinforce power while others deny it serves a central role in understanding and ultimately challenging systemic inequalities. Yet, when left unquestioned, the ways in which social justice advocates use names can have detrimental effects. The work of various poststructuralist authors illuminates the problems and…

Quality assurance in modern higher education is both an accountability-oriented ideology and a technological method. It has also evolved into a increasingly rationalist and professionalized power mechanism. Its advocacy of compliance, technological mythology, and imbalance between power and responsibility are inherent disadvantages of higher…

Many twenty-first century educational discourses focus on including and empowering independent learners. Within the context of five self-assessment models, this article evaluates how these practices relate to the realities of student involvement, empowerment and voice. A proposed new classification of these self-assessment models is presented and…

This article explores the literacy practices of the indigenous Semai Orang Asli community in Malaysia. Literacy for the Orang Asli often centres on formal education and schooling and is hardly explored from a social and cultural perspective. In fact, researchers have paid barely any attention to Orang Asli oral and literate traditions nor their…

School bullying is a complicated aspect of violence. It can be difficult for teachers to identify bullying and hard for students to report. This can include behaviors that are "offensive, abusive, malicious, insulting, and/or intimidating" (Quigg, 2011, p. 1). Some students struggle with bullying in the classroom and in the general…

I explore a spontaneous community art event involving pre-teen and teen refugee girls and their embodied experiences at a local café located in a Northeastern U.S. city. Their bodily encounters involved incipient actions--drifting, knitting, and wrist-tying performances--in the creation of a new space within the space of the café. Drawing on…

Australian universities over the last 25 years have been unified, internationalised, corporatised and become mass educational providers. This process is replicated globally as a response to rapid mass enrolments and marketisation. In the light of these changes, a corporate and managerial model has been identified, which has been the subject of…

This article reports on the role and value of social reflexivity in collaborative research in contexts of extreme inequality. Social reflexivity mediates the enablements and constraints generated by the internal and external contextual conditions impinging on the research collaboration. It fosters the ability of participants in a collaborative…

Researchers have examined learning partnerships from one-dimensional perspectives, exploring the voices of faculty or the voices of students. This duoethnographic study explored the learning partnership between a faculty member and graduate student on a research team. The authors situated this study employing a tripartite conceptual framework that…

The higher education sector has been undergoing a far-reaching institutional re-orientation during the past two decades. Many adjustments appear to have strengthened the role of competition in the governance of higher education, but the character of the sector's emerging new political economy has frequently remained unclear. Serving as the…