Internationally teachers are called upon to act as agents of change. However, there is little clarity about the kind of change teachers are expected to contribute to and even less empirical evidence about the ways teacher agency operates in schools and beyond. Empirical analyses of teacher agency require a clear articulation of the purpose and…

One outcome of more than three decades of social and political transformation around the world, the result of processes broadly referred to as globalisation, has been the emergence of a complex (and at first glance, contradictory) conceptual language in the social sciences that has sought to grasp hold of these developments. Throughout the 1990s,…

Recently, the "Education, Audiovisual and Culture Executive Agency" (2012) have funded programmes designed to advance European citizenship and citizen competences through education. This paper reports on the findings from one project, Creative Connections, designed to encourage the "voices" of young people in exploring European…

Intellectual disability is commonly conceptualised as stigmatised identity; however, within the literature, the notion of a damaged identity is contested. The aim of this research was to explore the social construction of intellectual disability from the perspective of staff who work closely with people with intellectual disabilities. Informed by…

To a certain extent, the distribution of high school education opportunities among the population determines the stratification of high school education opportunities. The researchers examined the distribution of high school education opportunities within the county region based on survey data on middle school graduation education tracking in Q…

Using Bourdieu's theoretical model as a lens for analysis, we sought to understand how students experience the undergraduate medical education (UME) milieu, focusing on how they navigate transitions from the preclinical phase, to the major clinical year (MCY), and to the preparation for residency phase. Twenty-two medical students participated in…

Respect"me" is a human rights organisation working to reduce the impact of bullying in Scotland. In this work, some useful conceptual and practice frameworks have emerged, distinguishing between aggression, as legitimate, if sometimes unpleasant, dominance behaviour and violence, which is unethical action involving the intent to harm.…

The study applies situated learning and communities of practice concepts to an ethnographic study of volunteer farm work. In contrast to a traditional conceptualization of education "for" leisure, participation in farm work activities is understood as a form of education taking place "in" a leisure context. Analysis reveals…

Significant attention has been given to how students become grouped or "tracked" through the courses they share in common. However, this work has yet to be connected to a targeted analysis of the way in which courses are grouped with other courses through the students they co-enroll. Drawing on insights from field theory, the author…

The purpose of this paper is to emphasize why education should be viewed as a means of opening up lucrative employment opportunities for a diverse population of adults that are seeking to transform themselves by obtaining an education and incorporating their past knowledge and experiences into new skill sets that would enable them to become…

This analysis is a philosophical exploration of Marilyn Frye's metaphor of the cage and Patricia Hill Collins' theory of intersecting oppressions. It argues that social structures and forms of oppressive knowledge make up the individual wires on each person's cage and that these work to confine individuals, particularly those in the…

"The Statistical Abstract of the United States," published from 1878 to 2012, is the authoritative and comprehensive summary of statistics on the social, political, and economic organization of the United States. It is designed to serve as a convenient volume for statistical reference, and as a guide to other statistical publications and…

Scholarly work on student and school performance poses a variety of explanations for observed variations. One explanation receiving too little attention is social capital, an intangible resource argued to grow out of social relations and social structure. The seedbed of social capital is argued to reside with John Dewey, who in 1900 used the term…

This study investigates the life experiences of six mature undergraduate women at a traditional 4-year university in South Korea. It explores women's construction of their university lives in the context of their wider socio-cultural experiences, both past and present, which are shaped by the socio-historical context of South Korean society. The…

After several years of political agendas focused on social inclusion, career guidance practice needs to return to its roots of promoting equality and social justice. This conceptual article argues that for many years there has been an overreliance on theories focused on the individual, and examines the relationship between social structures and…