The paper reports a study that used a Bernsteinian analysis in order to investigate the association between higher primary science curriculum and social equity in four contrasting socioeconomic contexts: British Columbia (Canada), Singapore, South Africa and Kenya. The official science curriculum of each jurisdiction was analysed in terms of…

Public education is not just a way to organise and fund education. It is also the expression of a particular ideal about education and of a particular way to conceive of the relationship between education and society. The ideal of public education sees education as an important dimension of the common good and as an important institution in…

This article examines the relationship between housing, a critical aspect of socio-economic conditions, and literacy achievement of children from a school in a high density suburb in South Africa. Data was collected through a quantitative survey that was administered to learners (N = 160) from four Grade Five classes. The survey included five…

Young South Africans face challenges in their attempts to rise out of the poverty and community violence surrounding them. These challenges might affect their sense of well-being. A thematic analysis based on semi-structured interviews from 18 field workers who work for a non-governmental organization focused on helping children in the Western…

This article begins with a critique of dominant approaches to language policy in education that are based on the notion of "rights" and "peoples." It makes the case for an approach that is based on the tripartite view of social justice, as articulated by Nancy Fraser. This view of social justice sees a complementary…

This article interrogates the notion of "glocalization" (Moja, 2004, based on Castells, 2001) as a concept that seeks to integrate the local and the global to address both the need for social justice and the need to participate in a global market economy. The article argues that the relation between the global and the local cannot be…

Policy documents for schools and education are being increasingly standardised all over the world and some research claims that a global curriculum is developing in which aspects such as entrepreneurship, lifelong learning and sustainable development are common denominators. This is regarded as a sign that economic rationality is gaining more and…

When the United Nations General Assembly authorized holding the World Summit on Sustainable Development (WSSD) in Johannesburg, it was hardly a secret--or even a point in dispute--that progress in implementing sustainable development had been disappointing since the 1992 Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro. With poverty deepening and environmental…