Against the backdrop of teaching being downplayed in higher education, this study unravels how the university faculty members' implementation of teaching excellence is influenced by the interplay of objective structural conditionings and subjective internal deliberations, drawing upon Margaret Archer's social realist framework and her distinction…

Mathematics education is not mathematics, it makes a basic use of highly specialized kinds of mathematical knowledge. The modern world feels a crisis of proper mathematics education in any nation. Realistic Mathematics Education is a domain-specific instruction theory for mathematics. This paper introduces realistic mathematics education (RME) and…

This paper describes how critical realism was operationalized to provide an explanatory framework for a small-scale qualitative study in the field of teacher education in a sub-Saharan African context. Critical realism combines a realist ontology (there is something to find out about) with a relativistic epistemology (different people will come to…

Against the backdrop of prevalent student attrition in engineering education, this study draws upon Margaret Archer's social realistic theory and offers a close-up analysis of how structural and cultural factors interplay to affect Chinese university engineering faculty members' perceptions of and agency in practicing 'scholarly teaching'.…

This article focuses on the design of a critical realist review that deployed Bhaskar's resolution, redescribing, retroduction, eliminating, identifying, and correcting schema and Pawson and Tilley's Context-Mechanism-Outcome configuration underpinned by realist social theory. Methodologically, the review examined the relationship between…

Contemporary critiques of student learning research call for new theoretical and methodological approaches. This article proposes a social realist approach to this research, using the morphogenetic theory of sociologist Margaret Archer. The applicability of this approach is demonstrated by reference to an empirical study of engineering students at…

Derrick Bell's pronouncement and challenge that racism is likely permanent has captured the imagination of Critical Race Theorists in education. Equally important are his ideas about living with the concrete conditions of racism. This article focuses on a tension within Bell's work. On the one hand, his writings are characterized by a certain…