Meritocracy is used by governments in many societies as an 'effective' way to represent social justice and legitimise -- explain away -- class inequality. By focusing on a small number of working-class students who achieve academic 'success' and have reached elite universities in an ideal meritocratic environment -- Chinese schooling -- this paper…

Guided by the theories of cultural intelligence and social distance, the purpose of this quantitative non-experimental study was to determine whether first-year American-born college students' political party affiliations and cultural intelligence (CQ) relate to their self-reported social distances (SDs) from international students. One hundred…

Filling in a research questionnaire means coming into contact with the researchers' assumptions. In this sense filling in a questionnaire may be described as a learning situation. In this paper I carry out discourse analysis of selected questionnaire items from a number of studies, in order to highlight underlying values and assumptions, and their…

This study reports on the dilemmas of practice experienced by a parent-school facilitator, Melanie, within a large urban school district. Melanie struggled to reconcile her commitment to families in her school with the demands placed on her by an administrative ideology that viewed families as adversaries. Her attempts to manage the conflicts…