"Because Democracy Is Difficult and Dangerous" is an excerpt from "Woke Is Not Enough: School Reform for Leaders with Justice in Mind" (2022). Each chapter of the book focuses on a domain of school reform relevant to school leadership today: racial justice, democratic governance, restorative justice, student activism, and…

Education reforms are rarely successful or free of controversies. However, efforts to "STEM-ify" public education in the USA by positioning education in STEM fields and training of future workforce as the central purposes of public schooling is proving to be remarkably successful and devoid of contention. This paper explains the success…

This paper examines ways in which the ethics of data-driven technologies might be (re)politicised, particularly where educational institutions are involved. The recent proliferation of principles, guidelines, and frameworks for ethical 'AI' (artificial intelligence) have emerged from a plethora of organisations in recent years, and seem poised to…

Accelerating advancements in learning analytics and artificial intelligence (AI) offers unprecedented opportunities for improving educational experiences. Without including students' perspectives, however, there is a potential for these advancements to inadvertently marginalize or harm the very individuals these technologies aim to support. This…

While applied linguistics research can serve as an important site for understanding and contributing to efforts toward challenging historical and contemporary power structures, it is also crucial to interrogate how numerous normative concepts and logics within the field of applied linguistics both reflect and reenact dominant power structures.…

In this paper I draw apart two different contexts of Freirean pedagogical practice that I label interactional and institutional. The interactional refers to the immediate learning environment with relation to the interaction between the students and the teacher. In contrast, the institutional refers to how the institutions of education are…

Neo-liberal higher education is preoccupied with the future, with study increasingly viewed as being important for and in the future, rather than valuable in the present. We argue that a preoccupation with the future itself has become the generator of the present as precarious. Paradoxically, the certainty of future transformation or change, forms…

Although climate change is already a reality in many geographical regions, and the scientific evidence of the global environmental danger is stark, 'business as usual' often remains unchallenged in business and management research. Moreover, business and management education continues to teach and promote human-centered economic models that are…

There is a robust debate about innovative ways to improve educational outcomes and governance in public schools located in the poorest townships in South Africa. This article looks at one recent innovation, a new model for providing basic education called 'collaboration schools', based on the British academy schools. We seek to understand what…

There has been considerable debate around the ethical issues raised by data-driven technologies such as artificial intelligence. Ethical principles for the field have focused on the need to ensure that such technologies are used for good rather than harm, that they enshrine principles of social justice and fairness, that they protect privacy,…

This article examines the policy construction of leadership at all levels in Scottish education. In the current reforms 'leadership at all levels' is being used to mobilise support around changes to the role of the headteacher and of the local authorities (LAs) to bring about greater system alignment. From a critical policy analysis six themes are…

This paper employs critical policy historiography of South Australian public education as a contextual backdrop that speaks to a hermeneutic phenomenological study of the lived experiences of two former public-school principals, who describe how their ongoing social justice schooling agendas in public education met with considerable departmental…

In the last four years, teacher-activists in the United States have engaged in an unprecedented wave of protests and strikes. The developing body of literature seeking to understand this flurry of activity has taken various analytical approaches; for example, distilling movements into their key tactics in the hopes of lending important tools to…

The education system in England, along with the leadership and management of its schools, has changed dramatically over the past fifteen years, heavily influenced by key features of the private school sector. However, in this article, it is argued that the strong policy focus on autonomy and diversity was in fact an accentuation of the historical…

This article is a call to action to prepare new teachers to be social justice change agents both inside and outside of the classroom. Framing this work is a driving question inspired by the current political moment and articles in this issue of "Teacher Education Quarterly": How can teacher education programs better equip pre-service…