Until recently the dominant critique of "student participation" projects was one based on the theoretical assumptions of critical theory in the form of critical pedagogy. Over the last decade, we have witnessed the emergence of a critical education discourse that theorises and critically analyses such projects using Foucault's notion of…

This article explores the constructions of class in British girls' school stories. Feminist scholarship has, to some extent, reclaimed the school story, pointing to the widening of acceptable gender roles for female characters in girls' school stories, compared to their counterparts in mixed-gender stories, and indeed real life. While the…

Reflexive accounts of physical education (PE) pedagogy and practice offer potential to reveal much about the intended and unintended learning, for both students and teachers, that can result from certain pedagogic encounters. Despite the promotion of reflective practice/s as a possible "panacea" for improved teaching and learning, there…

This article explores the entanglement of gender, education and empire in Bosnia and Herzegovina during the Habsburg period throughout the analysis of a unique institution: Sarajevo's Muslim Female School. Established at the very end of the nineteenth century, this pedagogical institution was the only school in Austria-Hungary specifically devoted…

This article was written as an auto ethnography, which allowed for a complex and personal exploration of professional standards, teachers' professional identities, neoliberal reforms, and approaches to literacy and creativity. This article reflects on a practicum which involved teaching Romeo and Juliet to two year nine classes at an all boys'…

The educational reproduction of elite masculinity in postcolonial societies has not been properly studied. This is partly because the postcolonial masculinities of non-western elites are accomplished through the cultivation of naturalized practices signifying the body politic of the nation-state. In Singapore, same-sex elite schools of colonial…

In this paper, I theorize fantasies of idealization at work in narratives of educational research. I take as an example one of the very first psychoanalytically oriented studies in the field: Marion Milner's, "The Human Problem in Schools," published in 1938. Evidence is drawn from Milner's published book as well as from the historical…

This paper examines how high levels of social-cultural connectedness and academic excellence, inflected by gender and social class, constitute a particular school habitus of "assured optimism" at an elite Scottish girls' school. In Bourdieuian terms, Dalrymple is a "forcing ground" for the "intense cultivation" of a…

Debate has grown about the legitimacy of Muslim faith schools within the British education system. At the same time, scepticism has developed towards multiculturalism as a normative approach for dealing with diversity. This article argues that it is worth retaining the normative impetus of multiculturalism by returning to its roots in political…

This paper draws on fieldwork done in Greystone School in South Africa, a single sex girls' school. I explore how the legacy of coloniser and colonised is reconfigured through the history of the school and the particular racialised politics of South Africa, where race and class have always been imbricated in differently nuanced ways before, during…

In 2005, a feminist educational organisation in the USA for young women, ages 14-21, adopted a policy in order to clarify their target constituency of girls and young women. The policy defined "girls and young women" not as a designation associated with fixed biological sex, but instead as a self-determined identity label creating an explicit…

This article examines whether Elinor M. Brent-Dyer's Chalet School books--a series of girls' school stories spanning the late 1920s to the early 1970s--can be regarded as historical sources for the study of physical education and dance in girls' boarding schools during this period. An overview of her experience as teacher and…

The present article examines the situation of girls in Spanish academic secondary education during the first Francoism. It outlines the measures introduced by the Franco Regime that maintained the traditional access for girls to the same academic curriculum followed by boys, although in separate schools. Later, it examines the various projects put…

This study explores four instances where parental choice has been employed as a legal "circuit breaker": (a) First Amendment Establishment Clause cases related to public funding, (b) Fourteenth Amendment Equal Protection cases regarding race-conscious student assignment, (c) Title IX regulations concerning single-sex education, and (d) a…

Evidence from a recent study of English teaching in three London schools in the post-war era suggests that changes to curriculum and pedagogy, commonly attributed by historians to the 1960s, were well underway in the 1950s. Major changes associated with "New English" occurred when teachers began taking the lives and experiences of their…