Metaphors are deeply embedded in educational discourse, yet few studies examine how educators use these linguistic devices to conceptualize, articulate, and make sense of their professional practice. This article examines the metaphors that 38 Canadian and American school leaders used to describe how they accomplished their social justice work in…

Special education critics' vigorous appraisals of the social model of disability, along with their analysis of its implications for special education, provide a valuable forum for meaningful dialogue about how educators are to understand the nature of disability. In this article, we offer our response to their recent articles. As advocates of the…

Background: the belief that women and science, including mathematics and medicine, are incompatible has had a long and complex history and still often works to exclude women from and/or marginalise them in science. Purpose: this article will seek to explore gender and educational achievement through investigating how such gendered presumptions…

Research has documented the ways in which students of Mexican origin are not succeeding academically in the same proportion as the rest of the US population. This process of educational failure occurs in the context of overt and more subtle forms of racism experienced throughout their schooling and everyday lives. Undocumented Mexican students…

The belief that there is one right way or method of inquiry to pursue truth as it is constructed has been rejected by postmodernism. Postmodernism challenges and opens up the central idea that only one set of limits are possible in supporting professional practice. Postmodernism designs a way to look at concepts through the context of meaning. The…

As part of a larger research project examining the biographies of university adult educators who entered the field between 1975 and 1985, the aim of this paper is to highlight a number of themes that have emerged from this investigation around the issue of sustaining commitment to social purpose. Our objective was to find out whether those in the…

Although theories on anti-oppressive education abound, few scholars have conducted empirical studies of anti-oppressive educational curricula to test the alignment of theories--constructed largely by university scholars--and practices carried out by K-12 educators and students. While feminist poststructuralist theorists have critiqued critical…

For decades, educators and researchers have observed practices of educational inequality in U.S. schools. In a multicultural democracy, schooling without educational equality constitutes injustice. This article explores the limitation of the current traditional teacher education in preparing highly competent and socially conscious teachers needed…

This article focuses on the basic idea that having equality and justice for all in schooling cannot be achieved in the current climate where students are viewed solely as individuals. In fact, given the educational debt and achievement gaps, the ideas of equality and justice are necessarily contradictory. Achieving justice, in light of the…

In the "Columbia Law Review," Harry Jones (1974) illustrates five general and sometimes overlapping purposes of the law. They include the preservation of the public peace and safety, the settlements of individual disputes, the maintenance of security expectations, the resolutions of conflicting social interests, and the channeling of…

An explanation of the change that has taken place in the aims and purposes of educational policy of industralized societies as the relationship between the education and the occupation systems has changed over the course of the transformation of elite education into a mass phenomenon is the objective of this paper. Analysis and discussion is based…

A ten-year research effort, conducted by the International Association for the Evaluation of Educational Achievement (IEA), explored the relative merits and failings of different national systems of education in the United States and in Western and Eastern Europe. The first section of this report deals with trends in American education as seen…