The idea of the classroom as a 'safe space' has been popular in education for at least two decades. More recently, the term has also been used by religious education scholars not least in the wake of the use of the term in the influential Council of Europe publication 'Signposts'. In this article, I want to question the usefulness of the term…

The purposes of this policy document are: (1) to encourage public-school instruction conducive to developing skills and gaining factual knowledge necessary for students' future success as critical thinkers, citizens, and leaders of the state of [STATE]; (2) to protect children against the unwarranted and harmful influence of politicized classroom…

In July 2015, the Pestalozzi Programme of the Council of Europe launched a 15-month trainer training course on the "Evaluation of transversal attitudes, skills and knowledge." The tradition of offering trainer training courses that relate to the Council of Europe's core values of human rights, democracy and rule of law has been well…

In this article Henry Giroux discusses corporate school reform movement and its detrimental impact on the public school system such as the closure of public schools in cities such as, Philadelphia, Chicago and New York to make way for charter schools. Giroux argues that corporate school reform is not simply obsessed with measurements that degrade…

Within the policy rationale of a "self-improving" school system, there are now several thousand National College designated "system leaders" working as consultants in English schools on aspects of school to school support. So far, there has been no systematic consideration of the long-term development of these consultants in…

"Imaginings" of the modern university include such ideas as "the ecological university" and "the pragmatic university". In his attempt to separate utopian from dystopian visions of the university, Ronald Barnett concentrates on an analysis of the ecological university and ignores, for example, the case of the…

The article investigates how deliberative democracy is related to argumentation in school science. We use examples of political models of deliberative democracy to synthesize implications for argumentation in science teaching and learning. Some key questions guided our approach: How does democratic deliberation work and how does it relate to…

This paper proceeds from the view that managerial capture has already become a fundamental problem after a couple of decades of largely untrammelled managerialism in our public universities, and that this problem is likely to be compounded by further shifts towards deregulation and de facto privatisation, which is the direction that current…

In this essay, I explore the contemporary value of John Dewey's conception of democracy to addressing the challenges of neoliberal globalization. I begin by describing his vision of democracy as a way of life that requires habits of experimentalism, pluralism, and hope. I then suggest that contemporary forms of mobilization, resistance, and…

In this article, we present a new critique of the Completion Agenda as inscribed in "Reclaiming the American dream," a policy document published in April 2012 by the American Association of Community Colleges. Our critique is grounded on the premise that community colleges should improve completion rates, but this should be motivated by…

Previous research has identified numerous obstacles that counteract attempts to involve pupils in democratic processes in schools. Drawing from deliberative democratic theory and sociolinguistic research on dialogic teaching we discuss an intervention grounded on the ideas of deliberative communication and decision-making in an elementary…

The aim of this study was to determine the outcomes in which problems were encountered in terms of achievement and reveal these problems experienced in social studies instruction based on elementary school teachers' views. The study was designed in accordance with the mixed research method. A questionnaire was firstly administered to the…

Sweden has experienced increasing educational inequity levels within its highly decentralized school system. With a reduced capacity to bargain collectively, the two Swedish teacher trade unions, the Swedish Teachers' Union (Lärarförbundet) and the National Union of Teachers in Sweden (Lärarnas Riksförbund), have sought to extend their role in…

One of the biggest criticisms of international law is the lack of effective enforcement, often compounded in human rights law by the system of treaty reservations that detracts from the main object and purpose of human rights protections. Ideally, once a country has ratified a treaty, it may create domestic law that provides an enforcement…

This article examines how the actors of a Chilean public high school navigated the political scenario produced when its students decided to occupy their school to protest a national Educational Reform. Using ethnographic data and interviews with high school students, it proposes to understand this process in the context of a figured world directly…