Encouraging children to become 'good citizens' who positively contribute towards society through charitable and philanthropic action as part of their civic participation has become a core focus of policy and practice. Yet the opportunities afforded to children for active civic learning within primary education remain under-researched. This article…

Early childhood has become a priority in national and international political agendas. In the last decade, states have elaborated social policies and launched a variety of programmes for young children. Using Critical Discourse Analysis, this research explores the most prominent conceptualisations of children and childhood underpinning official…

Increasing research focus is placed on how to embed social justice within Education degrees. This paper reports findings from the first two phases of a cohort study completed just before and at the start of the pandemic, which track Scottish Education students' reflections on social justice at one university. We used three focus groups (n = 14)…

Drawing on life history interviews, this paper seeks to explore the lives of a group of eight teachers, all with working experience in England, who self-identify as committed to a more socially just education system. Drawing on Levitas' "Utopia as method," this article examines these teachers' perspectives on and practices around social…

This article explores organisational infrastructure in the movement for safe schools during the COVID-19 pandemic. Drawing on several qualitative studies of educator organising during the pandemic, this article shows that educators across the United States have organised through a range of social movement organisations, including national…

Amid debates about CRT in education, this paper critically analyses laws that have reportedly sought to expand 'education on racism, bias, the contributions of specific racial or ethnic groups to U.S. history, or related topics' with the hypothesis that there would be little evidence of anti-racist ideology in policies pertaining to curriculum.…

Background/Context: Ethnic Studies is an umbrella term for a group of academic disciplines attentive to identifying oppression, restorying history, and creating liberatory futures. These disciplines were born from social movements, with students, educators, and community members demanding educational spaces guided by people who looked like them,…

This article is concerned with the discourses of teachers and teaching work that have circulated in UK and US education policy circles during the COVID-19 pandemic. Drawing on UK and US policy texts published in Spring and Summer 2020, we discuss how the policy discourses underpinning these texts re/define and mis/recognise teaching work. On a…

This article documents endeavours to establish a higher education program for incarcerated learners in Aotearoa New Zealand. Presently, prisoners serving lengthy sentences in the country are precluded from obtaining a degree while in custody, which is in stark contrast to other jurisdictions with comparable penal systems. This study examines the…

A persuasive solution for governments and systemic authorities seeking to improve the quality and equity of outcomes for students has been the localized management of schools. Believed to provide opportunities for context-sensitive decision-making, what remains unclear is how does shifting increasing management to the school-level generate the…

Drawing on intersectionality and representational identity theory, this article centers Black women legislators' collective and individual experiences to examine how their experiences shape their policy ways of knowing and education policy priorities. The women were guided by their own lived experiences of witnessing unequal educational…

Socially Accountable Medical Education is a global educational movement transforming the development and delivery of medical schools in higher education. It is described as an upstream policy approach that seeks to align medical education and local community healthcare needs. To better understand social accountability as a policy initiative, we…

This article explores the ethical dilemmas encountered by two ethnographers in adult education research in a context where neoliberalism impacts on education settings, policies, and social justice. Everyday ethical dilemmas arise in thorny situations in which the general ethical principles ethnographers are regulated by cannot help them react or…

Science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) teachers need sources of empowerment to effectively guide education policy and continue to participate in advocacy-based activities. This study surveyed 208 STEM teachers on their acts of advocacy to advance STEM education. The question that guided this research was as follows: What are the…

In recent years, a wave of science of reading (SOR) reforms have swept across the nation. Although advocates argue that these are based on science-based research, SOR remains a contested and ambiguous notion. In this essay, Elena Aydarova uses an anthropology of policy approach to analyze advocacy efforts that promoted SOR reforms and legislative…