"The Wire," a critically acclaimed television series on HBO, is one of the latest narratives of urban schools to appear on screen. The series--which unfolded across five seasons and aired its series finale in late 2007--is set in Baltimore and interweaves the stories of inner city residents, particularly a network of characters involved…

How to deal with the relationship between the researcher and the "researched" is a crucial thing in design of a language research project and the analysis of data. The paper mainly focuses the influence of power relations between the researcher and the "researched" people. To do social research "on, for and with" the…

This article makes an argument for a system of higher education governance that allows the university some freedom but one that manages to offer a critical examination of the lived circumstances of people and their worldview. This proposal for higher education autonomy on the continent is in tandem with Africa's experiences as well as giving space…

It is time to situate distributed leadership as a critical conceptualisation of school leadership; its popularisation has generally preceded conceptual and empirical development. Over the last 10 years distributed leadership has often been presented as a new construct of school leadership, though critique against education policy reforms and…

The term "leadership" metaphorically embodies a gendered hierarchy of labour. In this study women deans' values were found to be incongruent with the masculine discourse creating inner conflicts and alternative discourses. Data collected from 10 women deans from both male-dominated and female-dominated colleges were used to deconstruct leadership…

Leadership is a central role of the school counselor. However, this role is often intimidating to school counselors and school counseling students when viewed as a solitary undertaking. In contrast to the view that leadership is an individual responsibility, the distributed leadership perspective offers a counterview in which school leadership is…

Adult education for social change can occur within social movements, and the fight for Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgendered and Queer (LGBTQ) rights has included educational strategies designed to challenge heterosexist and homophobic systems of power. This article explores how the Queer Nation movement of the early 1990s deployed a Foucauldian…

Despite an enabling democratic policy framework, the leadership of many South African schools remains firmly entrenched within the formal, hierarchical management structure. The potential for teacher leadership is, therefore, relatively untapped and, where it is enacted, it is often restricted. We report on a small qualitative study which explored…

By concentrating on the formal school organization, researchers can miss the informal relationships that are fundamental to leadership. Distributed Leadership Studies (DLS) provides a framework for examining school leadership and management that considers the interactions of leaders, followers, and aspects of the context. The framework involves…

As educators who teach courses that examine social power, we often struggle with a specific form of resistance in the equity-oriented classroom: "That's just [the author]'s opinion." This "opinion discourse" emerges when students study scholarship that unsettles dominant knowledge claims and methods or when students are themselves asked to situate…

Currently, ethnographic interest in leadership is relatively sparse. This paper's focus derives from research about integrating diversity in leadership, and how some leaders are included and excluded from organisational influence in Further Education. Specific interest is in methodological opportunities to research leadership as observed…

This paper reviews New Labor priority educational policies since 1997 that have attempted to break the link between poverty and low educational achievement in England. It does so by examining these policy priorities against a mapping framework developed by the author for the Joseph Rowntree Foundation's Education and Poverty programme. This…

The authors' belief that using LGBT (lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender)-themed literature in schools is possible and necessary, coupled with students' sense that either it cannot or is not being done, prompted them to write this article. While the authors are sympathetic with students' perspectives, and agree that examples are limited, such…

While much of the work in language testing is concerned with constructing quality tests in order to measure language knowledge in reliable and valid ways, there has been a significant movement in language testing research that examines tests in the context of their use in education and society. This line of research exits from the notion that…

Traditionally, the Nordic curriculum has been viewed as a document with school subjects in focus. This article reports on how two national curricula function as instruments for governing education and explores the possible differences in how national curricula govern education. This investigation was carried out by researching curricula for…