This article considers the theoretical argument of anthropologist Tim Ingold, that the denial and subsequent encasement of bare feet in footwear was a critical characteristic of the development of modern societies, in exploring three aspects of feet, footwork, and footwear in the history of the modern school. First, the material conditions of feet…

The growing recognition of Maori education approaches and ways of knowing can be seen both as a response to the erosion and loss of traditional knowledge philosophies through the processes of colonialism and internationalism, and as a means of reclaiming and revaluing Maori language, identity and culture. Improving the educational success of Maori…

Background: A newly elected centre-right coalition government in New Zealand was forced to deal with the cumulative fiscal consequences of two unforeseen challenges: a global financial crisis in September 2008 and two major seismic events in the country's second largest city in 2009 and 2010. This paper examines the way in which policies for…

This paper first provides a critic of the implementation of compulsory national assessment protocols internationally, and then nationally through a review of the implementation process used for the introduction of National Standards in New Zealand, and National Testing in Norwegian mainstream schools. It then reviews the impact of these two…

The book is entitled History Wars in the Classroom: Global Perspectives and examines how ten separate countries have experienced debates and disputes over the contested nature of the subject, for example the "Black Armband" and "Whitewash" factions in Australia who adopt opposingly celebratory or denigratory views of Australian…

Considerable problems have arisen in New Zealand universities as a consequence of the conflict between the statutory role of the university as the "critic and conscience of society" and the dominant intellectual orthodoxy of cultural essentialism. A number of examples are used to show the extent to which culturalist ideological…

In this paper, it is argued that it is the centrality of the liberatory function of education--its "onto-formative" capacity--that has been most severely compromised through the contemporary recasting of "education" as both a marketable commodity (externalized knowledge) and a particular form of institutional activity…

The dominant influences that forged curriculum policy in relation to the literacy curriculum in New Zealand during the 1930s can be seen to be enmeshed in the politics of the wider context of what de Castell and Luke have identified as the "literacy ideologies of the British Empire". It was these literacy ideologies and concerns over the…

This paper addresses the educational implications of the geopolitical changes arising from the associated processes of globalisation and regionalisation for the small island states of the South Pacific. As an educationist whose research field combines analysis of the New Zealand educational reforms undertaken over the last decade within a wider…