With the increased state and national focus on student achievement, school leaders are pursuing a variety of strategies to better serve their students. Many effective principals are embracing distributive leadership, relying on their best teachers to also provide instructional leadership. Yet, many effective teachers have not had training (and…

As minority populations continue to grow, suburban school systems will bear a larger responsibility for educating students of color. Rapid demographic change may mean that students of color could walk into suburban schools ill prepared to address their academic and social needs. The focus of this study was to examine how and why several suburban…

Recent decades have seen a proliferation of books that "listen in" on the everyday lives of girls. In their research the authors maintain that "listening" to girls in order to make claims about what they "heard" is a theoretically mediated process, and therefore it is not as straightforward as many authors imply. The…

In 2002, the geographic knowledge of college-age students in the North was highlighted in a survey sponsored by the National Geographic Society. Students in the U.S. ranked second to last among those surveyed on questions assessing basic knowledge of world geography. That many young adults got "the facts" wrong about particular places…

Reversing language shift has proven to be difficult for many reasons. Although much of the literature has focused on educational practices, little research has attended to the visual presentation of language used in educational texts aimed at reversing shift. In this article, we compare language materials developed for two different language…

In this article I provide a meso-level account of the interactional-institutional link by revisiting Goffman's analysis of deference and demeanor in light of Bourdieu's discussion of institutional fields, cultural capital, and symbolic power. To acquire deference, one must exhibit the appropriate demeanor towards others, and one must be equipped…

Within the group therapy literature scapegoating is understood as an unconscious process that plays an important function in preventing groups from being split asunder as a result of unexpressed frustration towards the leader. When a group successfully challenges its leader to share power, the need for a scapegoat passes. In the search for theory…

The Carlisle Indian School, founded by Richard Henry Pratt in 1879 to educate American Indian youth as an assist to having those youth success in mainstream America, is featured in two recently published books, "The Real All Americans: The Team That Changed a Game, a People, a Nation," by Sally Jenkins (Doubleday, 2007), and "Carlisle vs. Army:…

In the ongoing debate of the efficacy of top-down versus bottom-up strategies to improve school districts, top-down is clearly losing. Many district leaders are reluctant to champion improvement for fear of being labeled with the epithet "top-down leader," the unkindest cut of all. In this article, the author presents the change…

This article critically analyses the AIM Assessment Model for children who have sexually harmful behaviour, exploring the underpinning knowledge and the processes involved. The model reflects current trends in the assessment of children, in child welfare and criminal justice services, producing categories of risk that lead to levels of…

Local peoples living in protected areas often have a different understanding about their natural space than do non-local groups that promote and declare such areas "protected." By designing protected areas without local involvement, or understandings of local social differentiation and power, natural resources management schemes will…

Distributed leadership (DL) is an emerging form of power distribution in schools which extends authority and influence to groups or individuals in a way which is at least partly contrary to hierarchical arrangements. In this article, the author presents the findings of his study that aimed to answer two questions: (1) What do headteachers do to…

This paper represents an autoethnographic exploration of white teachers in South Australia's Anangu Pitjantjatjara Yankunytjatjara Lands, through the lens of critical whiteness studies and racial contract theory. The broad aim of the paper is to return the gaze on the white subject within the context of White Australia. Moreover, this article…

Literacy today is characterised by rapidly changing and emergent forms of meaning making in the context of increased cultural and linguistic diversity, giving rise to the multiliteracies pedagogy of the New London Group. This article responds to these imperatives, reporting findings from a critical ethnography investigating the interactions…

Recent research on post-compulsory teacher educators in England suggests that there is a high degree of feminisation of this workforce, particularly where further and higher education partnerships are concerned. This process of feminisation has taken place against a background in which English post-compulsory education has increasingly been…