This article reports on a case study exploring the social positioning and identities of South Asian and Muslim girls in one British inner city secondary school. The analysis is situated within the context of 'everyday multiculturalism', a framework which provides a lens on racialized and gendered encounters in the school context. Whilst their…

This article presents a critical case study of an inner city state school that for a decade (1940s-1950s) attracted the interest of a wide contingency of educationalists, policy makers, researchers, artists and various press and film media. It has been argued that if we are to progress "social alternatives" in education, researchers need…

Popular television drama is an important discursive site engaging the public with debates about schooling and professional identity. Between 1999 and 2011, external discourses of "crisis" (of academic achievement or students' mental and emotional health) were mediated as alternative discourses of "crisis, failure, and…

Commonsense understandings of school practices have historically painted parents of color as inattentive and non-participatory actors in public school settings. Racist implementations of policy and individual actions, based on teacher ideology and deficit paradigms of race, force parents of color to take an oppositional stance in public school…

This paper uses Fraser's (1999) concept of social justice as comprising both redistribution and recognition as a frame to interrogate two "Area-Based Curriculum" projects running since 2008 in Manchester and Peterborough schools. It argues that historic concerns about working with "the local" in cross-curricular activities has…

The child population in the United States is rapidly changing and diversifying--in large part because of immigration. Today, nearly one in four US children under the age of 18 is the child of an immigrant. While research has focused on the largest of these groups (Latinos and Asians), far less academic attention has been paid to the changing Black…

This paper is developed from a study carried out to explore factors influencing the choices of a range of stake-holders in a multi-ethnic urban community--students, parents, teachers, community representatives--with regard to single-sex schooling. The paper discusses competing perspectives underpinning the focus of the study. Recent legislation in…

How leaders learn to become leaders has been an area of much research. When asked what were the key experiences in learning leadership, leaders often speak of the importance of "on-the-job" experiences, yet these experiences are rarely fully detailed in the research literature. The importance of "apprenticeships" and being…

This paper sets out the background and key findings from a number of research projects about diversity and equality at a UK university. The works were commissioned as a result of changes in legislation as well as a genuine concern to investigate the issues of inequity and institutional racism within the university. The paper explores the…

Boys in school, homophobia, and forms of masculinity are currently the focus of significant debate in and about education and schools. Much of this discussion takes as given the sexual orientation, and therefore sexual identity, of the students of whom it speaks and mobilizes equal rights discourses on behalf of gay and lesbian students. This…

Provides a narrative account of the development of a solutions-focused approach to school improvement. Describes the process whereby an urban primary school harnessed the collective energies of all staff (teachers and support staff) to bring about improvement, and considers the role of democratic leadership in reconceptualizing the school as a…

In British schools, and in the United States, black boys are both the heroes of a street fashion culture that dominates inner cities and students who receive a disproportionate amount of punishment in school. A central thesis of this book is that teachers in elementary and secondary schools cannot escape the wider social perceptions about young…

This study investigated the situation of ethnic minority students in predominantly white British schools, highlighting factors affecting their educational achievement and examining the perspectives of ethnic minority students and their parents and teachers. Surveys of the performance of over 34,000 students in predominantly white schools in 35…