The article analyzes contemporary discourses and practices of caregiving and mothering. Using a case study of one employed mother as a starting point, the authors engage in writing-stories that combine the analyses of their e-mail and face-to-face conversations from the last couple of years with various journal entries and interdisciplinary…

Since 1999, concerns about Scotland's future health and economic performance have profoundly impacted on the new Scottish Executive. Research highlighting an obesity crisis facing young Scots has, together with the work of Scotland's Physical Activity Task Force and Physical Education Review Group, encouraged the education of all young Scots to be…

Daegu University has enjoyed a long and remarkable history of special education. Daegu University is large University located in Daegu, South Korea, a large city in South Korea that is south of Seoul. Since the 1970's, South Korea has achieved unusual and comprehensive growth in its economy, and the field of special education continued to thrive…

This article explores the process of meaning-making from within the "narrative" mode and in particular considers the difficulty or even impossibility, in certain kinds of organisational and social situations, of constructing viable narratives. This experience is sometimes referred to as "losing the plot", hence the subtitle of…

This paper considers influences on the contemporary school curriculum in England. It does so mainly through a critical analysis of one significant critique of the curriculum made by the think tank Civitas in their collection of essays asserting the "corruption" of the curriculum, published in 2007. The paper places the Civitas position…

This study, as the first empirical test of P-16 policy antecedents, reports the findings from an event history analysis of the origins of state dual enrollment policies adopted between 1976 and 2005. First, what characteristics of states are associated with the adoption of these policies? Second, to what extent do conventional theories on policy…

In 2006 the author was contracted to research possible approaches to a UK indicator of education for sustainable development (ESD). This article describes and seeks to explain the response of government advisers and influential members of the UK ESD community to the approaches he proposed. While the UK strategy for sustainable development called…

This article compares the changes in the determination of educational aspirations from the end of the communist period in 1989 to 2003, focusing on a single postcommunist country, the Czech Republic. The Czech case is particularly relevant for comparative research on educational inequality and aspirations, as previous studies have shown…

This paper examines the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA), which has become a major and influential component of the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development's (OECD) educational work. This measure of comparative performance of educational systems of member and other nations is based on tests commissioned by the…

Purpose: This paper seeks to show the limitations of citation analysis to measure the quality of scientific contributions, also exploring the consequences of the assessment of research performance for educational institutions. Design/methodology/approach: The study reviews the literature about citation and assessment of the research endeavour to…

This article examines recent educational reforms in Tanzania by looking at the cultural politics of pedagogical change in secondary and teacher education. It presents an ethnography of a teachers college founded on the principles of social constructivism in a country where formalistic, teacher-centered pedagogy is the norm. Using data collected…

We provide an assessment of the French ZEP (Zones d'Education Prioritaire), a program started in 1982 that channels additional resources to schools in disadvantaged areas and encourages the development of new teaching projects. Focusing on middle-schools, we first evaluate the impact of the ZEP status on resources, their utilization (teacher…

This article discusses what lies ahead for education facilities and business in 2009 and beyond. For schools and universities, that's a safe prediction every year, but it's even more likely in 2009. Economic uncertainty is raising anxieties, tax coffers are dwindling, and budgets are collapsing, but the educational needs of students are just as…

Research on the history of children and childhood in modern Japan (1868-1945) reveals that issues related to civil society, state, and the establishment of institutions for young children can be explored beyond the transatlantic world. In this essay, after briefly surveying historiography, a few basic terms, and earlier patterns of state and…

In this paper, the author has attempted to analyze and assess the progress of education for all (EFA) in India from 1985/1986 to 2005/2006. A similar analysis by the same author on this subject, for the period 1950-1986, was published in this journal in 1990. During that period of 35 years the development of EFA was apparently impressive, but…