This dissertation investigated the development of stereotypes surrounding public school children in Brazil, primarily focusing on poor students of Afro descent. It explored how these stereotypes have influenced education policymaking and examined the efforts of Darcy Ribeiro and Paulo Freire to challenge these prevailing notions. Employing…

Globalization has become one of the most recurrent concepts in social and political sciences. More often than not, however, the concept is handled without much of a properly articulated theory capable of explaining its historical origin and expansion. For education researchers attempting to elucidate how global changes and processes affect their…

This paper explores various theories of curriculum intending to provide a new approach--which we regard as a significant theoretical contribution--to examine the broad set of different discourses that have been shaping science education. We first introduce concepts and values that support traditional and critical curriculum theories and offer some…

The key to sustained and equitable development in Latin America is high quality education for all. However, coalitions favoring quality reforms in education are usually weak because parents are dispersed, business is not interested, and much of the middle class has exited public education. In "Routes to Reform," Ben Ross Schneider…

This article discusses the implications of the contemporary transition from a solid modernity to a liquid modernity for school physical education, according to the metaphors adopted by the Polish sociologist and English resident Zygmunt Bauman. By leveraging Bauman's sociological theory, this article pursues two aims: (1) to examine how physical…

This article shows the intersections of right-wing conservative discourse and evangelical religious proselytism in shaping right-wing populist discourse in Brazil and its implications on the education policy in the last decade. Since re-democratisation in the 1980s, the policy path sought to guarantee progressive and inclusive public education,…

Background: Over the past 30 years, the Brazilian Landless Workers' Movement (MST), one of the largest social movements in Latin America, has developed a series of pedagogical practices for public schools that support the movement's struggle for agrarian reform in the Brazilian countryside. The MST's educational initiatives can be viewed in terms…

The aim of this article is to present a case study of an innovative school and illustrate how social aspects, in their subjective dimension, participate in educational innovation. According to the theoretical propositions from González Rey's cultural-historical theory of subjectivity, social aspects in the life of groups, institutions,…

This research is a qualitative case study of global and national (Brazilian) Environmental and Sustainability Education (ESE) policies in historical perspectives. My overall objectives are two-fold: First, to understand how global ESE policy frameworks have evolved ideologically over time--a concept I refer to as ESE policy trajectories; and…

Social movements have initiated both academic programs and disciplines. I present ethnographic data that I gathered during 17 months of fieldwork with the Brazilian Landless Workers' Movement (MST) in southeastern Pará, Brazil, to explore the MST's role in creating agroecological education opportunities. My analysis highlights three factors in…

Background: Teacher education, including physical education teacher education (PETE), around the world remains highly autocratic and content focused [Apple, M. W. 2000. "Official Knowledge: Democratic Education in a Conservative Age." New York: Routledge]. Scholars in physical education [O'Sullivan, M., D. Siedentop, and L. F. Locke.…

Given the increasing power of neoliberal and neoconservative agendas in education internationally, critically democratic policies and practices are now even more important. Yet, one of the major problems with critical work in education has been the fact that some of the academic leaders of the "critical pedagogy" movement and of critical…

This study focuses upon the narratives of women educators ("educadoras") who contributed to radical democratic school reforms in post-authoritarian Brazil. We illustrate through three of the teachers' narratives how their professional identities and actions were shaped partly by their experiences of resisting the military regime and by…

"The Routledge International Handbook of Critical Education" is the first authoritative reference work to provide an international analysis of the relationship between power, knowledge, education, and schooling. Rather than focusing solely on questions of how we teach efficiently and effectively, contributors to this volume push further…

While theories and recommendations continue to proliferate in the educational research literature on what it means to teach towards social justice and to prepare teachers for such teaching, so do concerns that these theories and recommendations fail to account for the ways that the contexts of teaching--cultural contexts, national contexts,…