This article reviews Margaret Meek Spencer's body of work in relation to the various policies that she critiqued from the Bullock Report in 1974 to the National Literacy Strategy in 2004. She analysed increasingly conservative moves to promote a dominant, elitist version of school literacy. A Critical Realist perspective aligns with Margaret Meek…

In this article, two government education policies for primary schools in England are scrutinised, the Phonics Screening Check and Baseline Assessment, both claimed by ministers to be 'evidence based'. What has become a high-stakes test rather than a diagnostic assessment, the Phonics Screening Check, introduced in 2012, now dominates early years…

This review provides a critical appraisal of Kubow and Min's paper. It teases out their conception of "liberalism" and argues that the classical notion of liberalism as a political theory that advocates individual liberty based on assumptions of the unencumbered autonomous individual has lost currency. This is because over the years…

Schools bring people together. Yet for many children there are major discontinuities between their lives in and out of school and such differences impact on literacy teaching and learning in both predictable and unpredictable ways. However if schools were reconceptualised as meeting places, where different people are thrown together (Massey, 2005)…

This article outlines how I, as a primary teacher engaging with a self-study action research process, have come to a deeper understanding of my practice. It explains how I have also come to an understanding of why I work in the way I do; of how this understanding influences my work, and the significance of this new understanding. My work as a…

This teacher research inquiry is a critical discourse analysis of second grade classroom talk about racial identity and dialect difference within the theoretical framework of moral philosophy. Participants in the study, which took place in an urban public district in a Midwestern United States city, included ten African American students and a…