In the 1970s and 1980s, the social and professional imaginaries of education, sociopolitical conceptions of it, and educational practices in Spain, began to be influenced by certain elements specific to critical popular education, which had developed in Latin America during the "long 1960s." Paulo Freire's work was particularly prominent…

In this article, I describe a few personal favorite contributions of Dr. Marcia Gentry, one of the most successful graduates from our doctoral program at the University of Connecticut, as well as a dear friend and collaborator. Marcia focused her life's work on the need to serve underserved and often-neglected populations in our field and…

Pierre Bourdieu had modest, peasant roots. He was born in 1930, in a rural family in the Béarn province of south-western France. He was the first one in his family to finish high school. His father, the son of a sharecropper, was a postal worker. Bourdieu, being a "scholarship boy," made his way to the elite École Normale Supérieure.…

In 1959, C. Wright Mills coined the phrase "the sociological imagination" to offer a critical assessment of a discipline he saw descending into a technical or abstract empiricist practice that he feared would ultimately deepen human alienation and oppression. Mills positioned the sociologist as a careful, critical scholar working in the…

A three-year-old boy, born in Melbourne, Australia, in 1892, lived the final months of his life in an abusive foster home. His death barely made a ripple in the press, and the system proved unable or unwilling to deal with much of the most disturbing evidence about the perpetrators of abuse. This article argues that cases like this one are more…

This paper is both a careful analysis of a seminal piece of work in the sociology of education, as well as a passionate plea to revisit with renewed urgency, the way in which education continues to fail unacceptably large numbers of working-class children. Through closely examining the work of Dennis Marsden (with his colleague Brian Jackson) in…

This study is a life history account of Bev, a special educational needs co-ordinator who works in a primary school in England. The research examines how, within Bev's experiences, the discourses of integration and inclusion have affected learners with special educational needs. Additionally, the study examines the impact of the…

This paper addresses some of the contradictions, dilemmas, and struggles in a Danish primary school practice involved in medicating children diagnosed with ADHD. It draws on a social practice research study of a 7-year-old boy diagnosed with ADHD, who was medicated against his will. It focuses on his struggles when being medicated, and…

Madrasa is the living form of an educational system which thrived in the past. It remained unaware of the swiftness of progress and development which came about in other walks of life and the education that was being imparted through it was also kept away from any change and innovation. As a result, the "madrasa," to some extent, fell…

Background/Context: Throughout history, a country's economic and military strength has influenced its times of cultural splendor and the rise of famous intellectuals and artists. Spain has been an exception to this. At the turn of the 20th century, a surprising series of events that no one could have predicted occurred. At the time, Spain had…

This article is part of a biographical research study, and explores the social path that an adolescent from a marginal background in Malaga (Spain) has travelled throughout his life. The research shows a class differentiation that divides society in two: you, who control the means of production, impose your culture, and define the policy and the…

Lurking in the shadows of education history are networks of human interaction, transcultural encounters, forms of global connection, and dispersed sites of cultural teaching and learning that are barely visible in the master narratives of education history. Who would have thought a half-century ago that we would become witnesses and participants…

Purpose: The purpose was to reconstruct the historical and legendary contribution of one exemplary African American physical education teacher educator who lived and worked in the Deep South prior to and immediately following the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education court case. The following questions guided data collection and analysis: To what…

The basic questions that a scholar interested in the study of language asks are concerned with language structure, acquisition, and change. William Labov is a linguist who has deeply influenced the linguistic scene in the past 60 years. It is to Labov's credit that he showed, backed by solid evidence, that the questions concerning language change,…

In a recent paper on gender inequality in higher education Buchman and DiPrete (2006) assume that the decrease in the gender gap in college completion in the US can partly be explained by changes in the allocation of familial resources in favour of women. However, they do not test this hypothesis empirically. In this paper I examine the effects of…