This article explores the diverse epistemic perspectives on intelligence, tracing its conceptual evolution across early Indian philosophy, Western philosophical thought and contemporary computational theories. Intelligence is examined as a dynamic, multifaceted phenomenon that transcends mere cognition, extending into embodied, ecological and…

During the last decade, the notion of norm-critique has had an impact on Swedish educational policymaking, including the gender-equality mission of the Swedish preschool. The aim is to better understand and problematize the relationship between gender equality, as formal curricular content, and norm-critique, as informal curricular content, in…

Recent discussions around education for global citizenship continues to retrace notions of cosmopolitanism first laid out in Europe. Ostensibly seeking global inclusivity, much of this work ultimately returns to a rather narrow set of ontological and epistemic themes, primarily Stoicism and Pauline Christianity. The Kyoto School offers a…

This paper explores how the twin processes of neoliberalism and neoconservatism work together on, and through, curricula and their associated pedagogies. It bridges the gap between policy and classroom practice, focusing on the particular example of the school subject of mathematics and the notion of mastery, operationalised in the English…

Purpose: This paper has a twofold purpose: (1) to demonstrate, largely with historical evidence, that, contrary to what some have argued, thinking about educational research articulated at the start of the twenty-first century was not really "new wine in new bottles" but, rather, a continuation of the so-called paradigm wars about,…

There are millions of children attending English as a Medium of Instruction (EMI) government schools for their basic education. The vast majority of these are in countries across the Global South. In these contexts, EMI policy decisions are rarely based on educational arguments while global learning discussions exist with limited engagement with…

The papers in this special issue on the spaces of pedagogy speak to the failures of neoliberal thinking when applied to education. Their pedagogical critique of neoliberalism contributes to a considerable body of work focused on challenging the driving discourses of education (or more accurately, school) systems. The source of the tensions between…

This paper outlines clear signs of market-led instrumentalisation for HE cultures in Britain, before critiquing the "ontological turn" in HE theory and its intrinsic political abdication from those signs. It focuses on a paper by Ronald Barnett to both diagnose the problem, which is a "precarité" that is ghosted in his work,…

In Canada, several universities have recently implemented course requirements in Indigenous studies as a condition of graduation, while others are considering following suit. Policies making Indigenous course requirements (hereafter ICRs) compulsory have caused considerable controversy. According to proponents, a main purpose of ICRs is to address…

This paper provides a curricular critique of an environmental education policy framework called "Acting Today, Shaping Tomorrow" (Ontario Ministry of Education, 2009). Answers to the following two curricular questions: "What should be taught?" and "How it should be taught?" frame the critique. Scrutiny of the latter…

This article provides a literature review on the effects of the OECD's Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) on education governance and policy process across participating countries. This review seemed necessary because there has been a growing body of literature on this topic since 2003, especially since 2010, because this…

Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to explore the use of critical policy analysis (CPA) in the fields of educational leadership and policy. In addition to exploring how CPA compares to traditional research approaches in educational leadership and policy, the authors consider the influence of long-established ways of knowing, why scholars choose…

This paper reports on an aspect of a broader study that investigated teacher educators' uptake of learner-centred pedagogy in post-apartheid Namibia. The paper shares part of the study that illuminated the path traversed by Namibian teacher education policy from 1990 to 2010, two decades into the country's post-apartheid self-rule. It argues that,…

This paper attempts to propose an alternative policy frame for higher education policy by demonstrating the inadequacy of the market approach adopted by the 2011 English higher education policy in addressing the economic and social agenda, and by reframing higher education as a mechanism that selects and distributes talents to vocational sectors…

Purpose: Though the first published application of critical race theory (CRT) to education occurred 20 years ago, implications of CRT for educational leadership did not occur until López conducted a CRT analysis of the politics of education literature in 2003. No publications explicitly identify the implications of CRT for leadership practice.…