This article problematizes the view that music education is primarily justified on account of its uniquely "humanizing" influence. Not only does this general humanist argument clearly fail to convince policy-makers to actually revalidate public music education, but moreover it often seems to rest on highly questionable premises. Without…

This essay, geared toward student reading in undergraduate and graduate courses that focus on the politics of dance, revisits the 1985 film "White Nights," directed by Taylor Hackford and starring ballet dancer Mikhail Baryshnikov and tap dancer Gregory Hines. The essay argues that the film's power as a political commentary on race in…

Pupil behaviour in UK schools continues to be an obsession in policy and education debate. Conservative governments, especially since 2010, have pursued an illiberal agenda which, this paper argues, is entirely associated with their project to create an education system based on performativity and competition as part of a neo-liberal economic and…

In this historical piece, Bob Teasdale, who was the Editor when the journal was known as the "South Pacific Journal of Teacher Education" (1975-1980) and who also served as President of the journal's professional organisation then known as the "South Pacific Association for Teacher Education" (1980-1981), details the early…

This article considers relations between inheritance, disobedience and speculation in art practice and art education in schools and other sites of teaching and learning. In recent decades educational practices such locations have been subject to doctrinal cultures of audit, standardisation and competences, invoking what Michael Hampe terms the…

Teachers in many countries complain that their pedagogic work is impeded by unreasonable bureaucratic demands by government agencies. This paper suggests that historical, institutional and cultural perspectives are needed to understand the processes at work. It draws on Weber's classic study of bureaucracy, but also makes reference to claims that…

In the United States, 31 states have abolished corporal punishment in schools. However, the documented negative impact of corporal punishment notwithstanding, in-school corporal punishment is still practiced in 19 states. Thirteen of these states are in the South. Why is the use of corporal punishment to discipline children so concentrated in the…

Indonesian political thinking is divided in two: political Islam and secular politics. Soekarno and Mohammad Natsir were dominant political figures in Indonesia, with the former being a secular nationalist, and the latter being an Islamist. Both these leaders inherited ideological disparities, and these distinctions separate political Islam from…

Background: Anti-welfare narratives depict welfare systems as overly-permissive, open to fraud, and fundamentally unfair. Countering these supposed ills have been political appeals to evidence and reforms made to disability benefit assessments under the banner of objectivity. But objectivity is a complex construct, which entails philosophical and…

Student participation has become a relevant topic in the international debate on education. However, the conceptions of the meaning of participation and its practical implications are very heterogeneous. This article reviews how educational policies have conceived student participation in Western countries. Having conceptualised student…

Right-wing populists have recurrently created moral panics internationally about the supposed need to 'protect free speech' in higher education (HE), and 'protect children' from progressive speech in schools. This paper presents the first systematic analysis of how such dynamics function with respect to race and faith equality in a national school…

Remediating unaffordable and inequitable access to secondary education precipitated Ghana's introduction of the 'Free Senior High School (SHS)' policy. The existing scholarship has done a good job tracing the implementation gaps created by this reform. Considering the importance of local actors, whose contribution to the sustenance of the policy…

As neoliberal policies became widespread, the number of studies concerned with those policies also increased. This study aims to analyse articles which are concerned with neoliberal education policies in the literature through systematic review. The current study makes efforts, in its scope, to exhibit the descriptive properties (methodological…

Background: In theory and practice, it is understood that personal relationships play a role in the effectiveness of translational models that bridge research and policy. These models can be made more efficient by understanding factors impacting relationships between policy-making players and third-party knowledge brokers. Aims and objectives:…

Research in mathematics education has long identified the ideology of certainty as central to mathematical instruction and to the way in which mathematics is (mis)used in social and political discourses. As we will see, this ideology is not merely a matter of individual beliefs, but is deeply embedded in the material practices and power structures…