The Gloucestershire Gateway Trust (GGT) is a social enterprise initiative in Southwest England focused on Asset-Based Community Development (ABCD). This article describes a six-year action research collaboration that has sought to support the GGT and its local non-profit organizational partners using a variety of action research methods, including…

This article examines young children's conceptualisation of the images they encounter within the familiar environments of the home and community settings, focusing on case study data from two, 4-year-old children. The data discussed are taken from a study involving a group of children aged 4-5 years. A participatory mapping approach was adopted,…

Language plays a crucial role in education; yet, while issues of language are undoubtedly relevant to all teachers, school-level language policies, which aim to provide explicit guidance underpinned by a clear set of principles, are too often conspicuous by their absence. In a range of educational contexts around the world it has been found that…

Autistic people report greater comfort socialising and easier communication with each other. Despite autism being stereotypically associated with lack of social motivation, an autistic community has been described briefly in the literature but is not well understood. Autistic community connectedness may play a role in promoting wellbeing for…

Creative activism is an approach to education that asks: 'What can happen when we take learning outside the classroom and think of it happening everywhere?' Two charities--House of Imagination and Cambridge Curiosity and Imagination--have been asking this question in their creative place-making programmes working with socially engaged artists and…

This paper uses Anderson's notion of 'imagined community' to argue that how people think about the publicness of their school system provides insight into the functioning and flourishing of communities, societies and nations. We focus on the privatisation of public schooling in Alberta, Canada and Northern England to highlight tensions between the…

This article reports on a doctoral case study of how an English integrated nursery school and children's centre fulfils its legal duty to promote community cohesion. The provocation for the enquiry derives from the author's growing unease over the perceived limitations of a target-driven culture currently pervading English schools. A case is made…

The paper draws upon ethnographic research of two contrasting English primary schools and their villages to explore the themes of belonging and exclusion in contemporary rural contexts. The paper first describes the schools and the villages. A second, conceptual section explores the meaning of rurality in relation to the themes of class, belonging…

The United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child provides a significant platform to include children's views on issues that affect their lives, yet, in many contexts, particularly in educational practice, children's perspectives continue to be irregularly sought and are rarely acted upon. By providing children's perspectives on what they…

Coaching in the participation domain is the act of coaching participants that are less intensely engaged in sport than performance orientated athletes. This form of coaching is a popular activity occurring in community settings such as schools or sport clubs, and it is often undertaken with a broad range of social and health outcomes in mind. The…

This article reflects on the experience of a large interdisciplinary research team that included geographers in a study of older people's participation in community life in areas of rural Britain. The mechanisms used for facilitating interdisciplinary collaboration around the development of a collective conceptual framework and associated…

This article focuses on findings from an Economic and Social Research Council study in England about the uses of information and communication technologies (ICTs) among 15 highly mobile migrant workers within their transnational families. Using an extended case study approach including ethnographic methods and a thematic analysis, patterns…

This article compares the development of citizenship education (CE) in Taiwan and England, as well as teachers' perceptions about the liberal and communitarian constructs underpinning the curriculum in both countries. Due to distinct social and political environments, the Taiwanese and English CE curricula demonstrate an interesting contrast.…

The government in England is proposing that every school should offer extended services to children, families and communities. However, in the absence of agreed models of how such community-oriented schooling should operate, its form will depend on how it is understood by the education professionals and their partners in other agencies who have to…

This article examines the impact of the concept of social capital on the citizenship education initiative in England through its influence on the normative content of the policy, as embodied in the report of the Advisory Group on Citizenship (AGC)--which was one of the immediate causes of the inclusion of citizenship in the National Curriculum in…