Catherine Priggs and her history department colleagues were increasingly concerned that their curriculum was too narrow. They feared that major areas of history were being left out and that many of their own pupils were not seeing themselves, in their various ethnic, cultural and world identities, in the past. Priggs and colleagues decided that a…

Trangression is an act of challenging boundaries that separate apparently distinct oppositional categories objects. Examples are categories such as such as civilised/primitive, male/female, master/servant, Lordship/bondage. The article deals with such transgressions related to the evolution of class consciousness transgressive critical thinking.…

This article argues that the Teaching Excellence Framework manifests the vice of epistemic insensibility. To this end, it explains that the TEF is a metrics-driven evaluation mechanism which permits English higher education institutions to charge higher fees if the 'quality' of their teaching is deemed 'excellent'. Through the TEF, the Government…

Across the globe, from the very wealthy continents of North America to Europe to Australia, the phenomenon of migrant and immigrant students outperforming native students are observed and documented. Some migrants and immigrants from China, the Philippines, India, Russia, Africa, and the Caribbean are reportedly achieving higher test scores than…

This article is a response to Muslim students reporting that they had been silenced by fear of the PREVENT Counter-Terrorism Strategy. By adopting a Critical Realist stance, real generative mechanisms of this actual phenomenon are investigated and theorised. Recognition of changing definitions of both 'radicalisation' and 'extremism' in different…

The global rise of 'neo-populism', culminating in the election of the populist Republican candidate Donald Trump to the US presidency, has been accompanied by a notable backlash and resistance to what has been categorised as governing/dominating 'elites', including HE academic institutions. Populist critiques centre on a perceived climate of…

This article reports on the design and implementation of an alternative form of writing assessment in a UK English for Academic Purposes (EAP) pre-sessional course. The assessment, termed processfolio, was a response to research inquiry into how writing assessment in a local context negated student agency and inculcated disempowering models of…

Report writing is an important employability skill for Engineers and Technologists, and this case study describes how a Technology degree module took a novel approach to developing students' report writing skills. Students learned how to use a criterion-referenced critical evaluation framework for reports and other technological documents. They…

The movement towards "openness" in education has tended to position itself as inherently democratising, radical, egalitarian and critical of powerful gatekeepers to learning. While "openness" is often positioned as a critique, I will argue that its mainstream discourses--while appearing to oppose large-scale operations of…

Corpus linguistics, or the gathering together of language into a body for analysis and development of materials, is claimed to be an assured, established method (or field) that valuably informs pedagogical materials and knowledge of language (e.g. Ädel 2010; Gardner & Nesi, 2013). The fundamental validity of corpus linguistics is rarely, if…

Following Aristotle's description of youth and brief discussion about indoctrination and parrhesia, the article historicizes Socrates' trial as the intersection of philosophy, education and a teacher's influence on youth. It explores the historic-political context and how contemporary Athenians might have viewed Socrates and his student's actions,…

This paper explores some of the unresolved tensions in higher education systems and the contradiction between widening participation and the consolidation of social position. It shows how concepts of capital derived from Bourdieu, Coleman and Putnam provide a powerful basis for critique, but risk a deficit view of students from less privileged…

This article begins by critiquing the long-established acronym CALL (Computer Assisted Language Learning). We then go on to report on a small-scale study which examines how student non-native speakers of English use a range of digital devices beyond the classroom in both their first (L1) and second (L2) languages. We look also at the extent to…

To date, scholarship on international students has generally focused on flows from non-western economies to the main English-speaking destination countries (such as the United States, the United Kingdom and Australia). In contrast, we draw on a qualitative study of 85 UK students who have either completed or are considering undertaking a degree…

The religious thought of Russian novelist Leo Tolstoy is a well documented but often overlooked example of unorthodox Christianity. This paper uses the example of Tolstoy's religious thinking to question the integrity of the current representation of Christianity in UK schools. It also uses Tolstoy's criticism of orthodox Christianity to suggest a…