Sociologists recognise research or other constructions of society are not neutral. Ideologically generated 'fact', or 'findings', can reproduce elite vested interest. There is a lacuna in our knowledge about educational research policy, including inherent ideological leanings, giving cause for concern about 'findings' that are congruent with…

This paper focuses on the relationship between agency and knowledge within the context of rising nationalism and populism. The case is the Czech debate over the reintroduction of civil defence education (CDE). It was abandoned in 1989 but recently, many new and contradictory calls for its return have appeared. We aim to gain an understanding of…

This paper explores the emergence of the term 'polycentricity' in education policy research and compares its use in education to its historical use in its 'parent fields' of political science and economics. We focus on the leading role of Stephen Ball and colleagues in popularising the term in education, inspiring other education scholars to…

The article presents the results of an analysis of the academic dispute about the scholarly ethos, conducted at the time of intense higher education reforms in Poland. Previous analyses of the academic debate on the change of the traditional university towards its entrepreneurial organization emphasize the polarization, that is, the criticism or…

Chinese education scholars Cesan Wang and Qiquan Zhong led a debate over knowledge centredness versus student centredness in China's ongoing pre-collegiate curriculum reform. The debate was considered the most influential academic event in the past 30 years in the field of education in China. Employing a Critical Discourse Analysis approach, this…

The aim of this article is to show how governmentality may be used to analyze historical events and discourses, and how this historical analysis can be used as a perspective to problematize contemporary discourses. The example used in this article is from my research on life-extension handbooks published in Sweden 1700-1930, and by this I stress…

This article provides an analysis of the frequency with which the word radicalisation appears in 21 Ofsted reports published as a result of inspections carried out in some Birmingham schools following the "Trojan Horse" affair. The technique of key-words-in-context was employed to study the range of its uses in the corpus of the reports.…

The discourse of disengagement has achieved ascendancy just as young people's employment prospects have declined--in many countries to crisis levels. Conceptualising and interpreting young people's non-participation in dominant modes of education, training and employment has been a preoccupation of academics, policymakers and journalists. This…

Phenomenograhy, as an approach to educational research, began appearing in publications early in the 1980s with the predominant form of data drawn from semi-structured interviews. As a qualitative approach, it is used to describe the variations in people's experiences through their own discourse and for analyzing meaning that people ascribe to…

A critical reading of the Donaldson Report on teacher education in Scotland reveals what might be termed a "panacea approach" to addressing perceived current problems in relation to the quality of teacher education. In particular, the essence of the Donaldson Report is that teachers need to embrace "twenty-first century…

Accountability is one of the most advocated and controversial topics in US education. Since the early 2000s, the federal government has produced a vibrant discourse on accountability, which emphasizes quality, efficiency, and equal opportunity in education. As part of the larger phenomenon of new managerialism, the dominant forms of accountability…

This paper focuses on the EU discourse on Higher Education and analyses this discourse within the context of globalisation. Importance is attached to the issues of lifelong learning, competitiveness, diversification, entrepreneurship, access, knowledge society, modernisation, quality assurance, innovation and creativity, governance and business-HE…