This paper revisits and reassesses the intellectual and practical contribution of Caroline Benn (née DeCamp, 1926-2000) to politics, policymaking and practice at a crucial turning point in English education, which I call the 'long comprehensive moment' between 1950 and 1990. It articulates a strong sense that her involvement in significant public…

This ethnographic comparative case study documents the work of the refugee category in Quito, Ecuador. It examines "refugee" in relation to institutional power and details how different educational stakeholders, including young migrants, appropriate and relate to the refugee category. Situated in an urban context where those who have…

The methodological overrepresentation of moral dilemmas in recent Youth Participatory Action Research (YPAR) discourse has culminated in a critical stalemate--a methodological paralysis brought on by an overly cautious fixation on personal moral hazards. As critical YPAR scholars, we honor these necessary interventions but are also concerned that…

This essay explores the interplay between action learning and democracy in organizations, institutions and society. We start by reflecting on the history of democracy as an emancipatory discourse in management learning and education. We elaborate on critical reflection in action-based approaches to learning and identify key elements of critical…

Role-playing games (RPGs) are storytelling activities that mediate co-authorship through a variety of in-game, out-of-game, and intertextual relationships. Liminal interactions sometimes occur during RPG play that blur these categories. To understand the purposes and processes of "liminal play," this study analyzed data from a yearlong…

In this critical discourse analysis, I explored the language used in "campus update" emails sent to faculty, staff, and students to better understand how university presidents communicate via email to institutional stakeholders. Specifically, I explored the use of effective stance, epistemic stance, and intersubjectivity in this corpus…

This theoretical paper provides valuable insights into the ongoing debates on OfSTED's fitness for purpose and effectiveness. It critically examines the current education inspection system in England through the lens of complexity theory. The paper begins with a review of significant changes in the system from 2019 to the present, explaining that…

This paper studies when decentralization improves public service delivery. I analyze a Chicago reform that awarded select principals greater autonomy over budgets and operations while holding resources largely unchanged. A meta-analysis of similar reforms shows substantial heterogeneity, including both positive and negative effects. Building on…

Bringing Edward Said's intellectual work into education comes with a certain irony. As early as his magnum opus, "Orientalism," Said already questioned the social function of intellectuals as experts, arguing that the project of orientalism could not have transpired without the 'expert' eyes of intellectuals who distorted the Orient…

Learning from Freire can be a live-long endeavor, always adding humor, rigorous critical theory, and narrative. This article addresses the theoretical and cognitive ways in which Freire can be embraced. Moving far beyond banking education and fixed ideological notions of Freire's work, it is important to consider the tentative when reading and…

Power has always been an element of the program evaluation field, however, it has traditionally been attributed a negative connotation. With that in mind, power is seen as a force possessed to some extent by different stakeholders that can be imposed over others, and by which certain views, ideas, and decisions can be adopted. Given that program…

This paper extends the theory of powerful knowledge to school economics by articulating the nature of powerful disciplinary knowledge in the subject. In order to develop a framework for conceptualizing powerful knowledge in economics, the literature that identifies powerful knowledge in other school subjects is first explored. Then, follows an…

Recentering whiteness is a misnomer --it seeks to address a tension that is real but locates it inaccurately and thus the critique becomes absurd. If we can't find a moment when whiteness was ever notcentral to the social organization of the modern world, why would we be concerned about notions of "re-centering" what has never left the…

Numerous qualitative researchers employ the Deleuzoguattarian construct of "rhizome" in their work. In this paper, we consider the ethical affordances made possible by the rhizome's theoretical features to propose "rhizo-ethics": an approach to ethical discernment in qualitative inquiry which engages with the Deleuzoguattarian…

Many societies in the Global South have adopted English-medium instruction (EMI) policies, but often ignoring--whether by design or involuntarily--the damages caused by the colonial legacy inherent in EMI. This neglect of the repercussions has also been inadequately addressed in the current EMI scholarship. Additionally, overlooking the…