Some recent science education scholarship has called for a renewed focus on empowering learners to engage with science for personally and socially meaningful purposes. However, engaging with science in these ways requires that learners adopt epistemic aims in their activity, which we cannot take for granted. I argue here that serious games could…

As research on transgender and gender nonconforming children and youth becomes increasingly prevalent in literary scholarship, educational possibilities arise for teachers of children's and young adult (YA) literature in various classroom settings. This article provides a brief history of literature for children and teens containing queer and…

Despite the widespread interest in using and researching simulation in higher education, little discussion has yet to address a key pedagogical concern: difficulty. A "sociomaterial" view of learning, explained in this paper, goes beyond cognitive considerations to highlight dimensions of material, situational, representational and…

Can selecting on the basis of academic ability at secondary school level be reconciled with equality of opportunity? One common view is that although the two can be reconciled in principle, for various contingent reasons selection tends to undermine equality of opportunity in practice, for example, it tends to advantage children who have been…

Grouping children by achievement levels is a thriving practice in New Zealand primary school mathematics classrooms. In this paper we look at the impact of a formative intervention project--"Developing Communities of Mathematics Inquiry"--that required a whole-school shift to mixed achievement grouping. Engeström's Cultural Historical…

This article argues that while there exists considerable overlap and potentially productive dialogue between political theory and language policy scholarship, any such effort will be hampered by the dominant approaches to political theory that assume individualistic and instrumentalist conceptions of language. Augmenting the language ideologies…

This article critically analyses national development, a false narrative for the establishment of national literacy, a national math strategy, and national identity plans for student success. The danger and power of false narratives of national development are analysed, especially when subscribed to by formal colonial educational institutions like…

Despite having been a prolific academic, whose work exerts considerable cross-discipline influence, the ideas of Foucault are largely neglected in educational technology scholarship. Having provided an initial brief overview of the sparse use of Foucault's work in this sub-field, this paper then seeks to generate new understandings, arguing that…

This paper introduces the idea of enculturation to sociology as a compliment to socialisation in the context of Bourdieu's "collective enterprise of inculcation" and social theory. Enculturation is positioned as a concept that can be used to address formal education as a factor in social reproduction. Following a discussion of…

In this paper, the authors argue that despite a resurgence of elite studies, the majority of existing scholarship works to reify and legitimize social inequality through its language and method. In particular, the authors utilize Pierre Bourdieu's concept of relational thinking to review and critique contemporary research on elite education and…

Student engagement in higher education has tended to be discussed in mainstream discourses by invoking typologies, seeking to place students into categories and focusing on the importance of "participation". I will give a critique of these ideologically loaded and normative constructs and their inherent contradictions, proposing an…

In this piece I raise a number of rural education issues that I think might be productively engaged through a sociological lens. The paper has developed from notes on 'international trends in rural education' for a pre conference workshop of AARE in December of 2014. My general conclusion is that the field of rural education, at least as it exists…

This paper uses Deleuzoguattarian schizoanalysis to interrogate concepts of social justice in relation to the crisis of neo-liberal capitalism by referring to the work of the Situationist International movement, the posthuman philosophy of Giles Deleuze and Félix Guattari as well as Afrofuturism. Providing an array of new theoretical responses as…

Introduction: This paper considers practice theory and the analytical implications of using this theoretical approach in information literacy research. More precisely the aim of the paper is to discuss the translation of practice theoretical assumptions into strategies that frame the analytical focus and interest when researching workplace…

Introduction: This paper applies the thought of Jacques Rancière to the concept of democracy as it is traditionally understood in library studies literature. Methods: The paper reviews a cross-section of instances of the link between democracy and the public library in library studies literature. It offers a close textual analysis of Michael…