Despite longstanding calls for social justice-oriented teaching, there remains limited understanding of how to achieve it. This paper reports findings from a research-development project that explored the experiences of UK-based primary science teacher educators participating in a nine-month equity-oriented professional development programme and…

It has become a truism that Britain is a multi-cultural society yet, as Mohamud and Whitburn argue, there is still a great deal of thinking to be done by history teachers in accounting for this diversity in the classroom. Mohamud and Whitburn consider approaches to both curriculum and pedagogy when it comes to teaching about the Somali community…

Most people, school teachers and children included, are altogether too sure about what gender is: there are two "opposite" sexes, man and woman, and gender is the inevitable categorical expression of natural sex. Like all commonsense views, however, the gender binary has been socially constructed through normalising discourses that frame…

This paper discusses a way of thinking about disability which has emerged out of the UK Disabled People's Movement over the last three decades in opposition to the preceding medical model of disability which viewed disability as synonymous with problem. Disabled people are increasingly challenging the notion that their embodiment is inherently…

The English Geography National Curriculum encourages primary teachers to focus on similarities and differences when teaching distant places. The issues this raises are particularly acute when teaching geography in the context of the Global South. In this article I argue that comparisons based on object-based thinking can lead to views of the…

"Interrogating Heteronormativity in Primary Schools: The No Outsiders Project" is a book that reflects on a research project based in primary schools and funded by The Economic and Social Research Council of the UK. This text is accompanied by another practice-focused work: "Undoing Homophobia in Primary Schools". The project…

Britain is not only more diverse than ever before, but that diversity itself is growing more diverse. Britain's simplistic "tick-box" approach to identity is in danger of inhibiting the very equality it seeks to promote. To question the tick-box is not to accuse local authorities of "political correctness gone mad". The notion…

In the United Kingdom, the introduction of the Disability Equality Duty 2006 has provided a new window of opportunity to promote the idea that education has a role to play in changing non-disabled children/young people's attitudes towards disabled people. This article explores the issues raised by the application of the Disability Equality Duty to…

This article provides a critical account of a selection of approaches that were used in the 26-month No Outsiders participatory action research project in education settings. The paper questions what challenges are presented to educators in critically exploring and challenging heteronormative sex-gender discourses. We revisit some of the tensions…

Where are all the disabled people in children's picture books? This article will introduce an innovative three-year project, based in the United Kingdom, which asks this question of the book world. In The Picture, managed by disability charity Scope, aims to point out the invisibility of disabled people in children's media to publishers, writers…

This article will review some problems with taking the notion of sustainable development, as a policy, as the touchstone of environmental education and will explore some central strands to understanding sustainability as a frame of mind. It will be argued that at the heart of this interpretation of sustainability lies the notion of a right…

This article discusses the implications of difference in relation to religious education, multiculturalism and contemporary "terrorist" global activity. It argues that the model for religious education in England and Wales has not been sufficient in addressing children's spiritual development. Religious education has been pursued through…