This article analyses the discursive unities which make possible the current transformation of teacher training and our understanding of teaching as a profession, while focusing particularly on European educational policy and the situation in Slovakia. Using Foucault's archaeological method, we reconstruct the discursive link points between the…

Teacher professionalism in England may be considered to have been shaped by the set of professional standards, and the accompanying statutory performance management system, introduced by the Labour government in 2007. More recently the coalition government's 2010 White Paper, "The Importance of Teaching", announced reforms that will…

This article examines the unique challenges facing Kenya's public higher education institutions. It explores the struggle to develop quality and quality assurance mechanisms against a background of rapidly diminishing income, brain drain, political interference and the negative aspects of globalisation. The challenges have consequently led to a…

Shortly after taking power following the May 2010 UK general election, the Conservative/Liberal Democrat government published its education white paper, "The Importance of Teaching". In this, certain features for primary school pedagogy can be discerned. Using the lens of the "position call", this article examines the…

The influence of Confucian culture in Chinese Mainland China is reflected in the current situation and contextual trends of educational research content of educational thought of Confucianism, educational issues grounded on theoretical views of Confucianism, and the influence of the inclusiveness of Confucianism. In terms of research method, the…

This article examines the intertwining of neoliberal urbanism and education policy in Chicago. Drawing on critical studies in geography, urban sociology and anthropology, education policy, and critical analyses of race, the author argues that education is constitutive of material and ideological processes of neoliberal restructuring, its…

The period of the Thatcher Government continues to have special significance for politics and governance in Scotland. In the 11 years of the Thatcher Government, landmark legislation and reforms affected key areas of the Scottish society and economy. Education featured prominently in the Thatcherite agenda in Scotland. In Scotland, the education…

This article proposes a model for judging children's participatory parity in different social spaces. The notion of participatory parity originates in Nancy Fraser's normative theory for social justice, where it concerns the participatory status of adults. What, then, constitutes participatory parity for children? How should we judge the extent to…

This article articulates the appeal of different conceptualisations of community to the curriculum writers of Belonging, Being and Becoming: the Early Years Learning Framework for Australia and to the Council of Australian Governments that commissioned the Framework, and the tensions within and between those respective conceptualisations. It then…

This article problematizes the construction of youth as a "driving force" in the contemporary configuration of the European Union (EU) as an educational and political space. The study draws empirical nourishment out of documents that are central to the ongoing formation of the Union, be it White Papers, scripts or memos concerning…

Education leaders in Congress are signaling that they're prepared to collaborate with the White House on a long-stalled reauthorization of the main federal law for K-12 education, after President Barack Obama sought to move education back to the top of the national agenda in his State of the Union address last week. Precollegiate policy is widely…

More than a dozen education programs--including high-profile efforts focused on literacy, teaching, and learning--face the prospect of a permanent federal funding loss after they were chopped from a stopgap spending measure signed into law by President Barack Obama last week. The temporary spending law, intended to keep the government running…

Much work in the field of education for democratic citizenship is based on the idea that it is possible to know what a good citizen is, so that the task of citizenship education becomes that of the production of the good citizen. In this paper I ask whether and to what extent we can and should understand democratic citizenship as a positive…

If patriotism is morally unacceptable, as some philosophers believe, then also education for patriotism cannot be tolerated, although some other non-moral reasons might be in favour of such education. However, it seems that not all types of patriotism can be convincingly rejected as morally unacceptable. Even more, if MacIntyre's claim is correct…

In this text I concentrate on semiotic aspects of the theory of political identity in the work of Ernesto Laclau, and especially on the connection between metaphors, metonymies, catachreses and synecdoches. Those tropes are of ontological status, and therefore they are of key importance in understanding the discursive "production" of…