Drawing upon the work of Foucault and Latour, this article reflects on 25 years of critique of competence-based education and its continuing strength as a way of framing education and training. Using an example from England, it rehearses the argument from Foucault that, despite its student-centred discourse, competence-based education can be…

Our aim in this article is to examine the relationship between theory and practice in Finnish teacher education from the 1960s to the present. We identify four different periods to represent this relationship based on our analysis of national committee and evaluation reports. Theory and practice gradually converged, culminating in a research-based…

Through an ecological and autoethnographic analysis of a repository of diachronically archived texts written over a period of six years in multiple cultural, geographical, and disciplinary contexts, the author unfolds his materialized experiences of coming to terms with, embracing, and composing with rhetorical differences as spatiotemporal…

Policy texts present problems, propose solutions to those problems and persuade multiple audiences of the legitimacy of the proposed problems and solutions. The rhetorical analysis of two decades of higher education and science and technology discourse in Finland, Germany, UK, Portugal and USA highlights the discursive elements that contribute to…

In the light of some recent transformations in higher education, a moral governance of university teachers is starting to emerge, suggesting a decrease of professional autonomy. By drawing on the idea of Gilles Deleuze's "clinical analysis", the aim of this article is to re-problematize the increasingly common moral image of students'…

This paper focuses on Scottish policy on additional support needs and its material outcomes. The central question addressed is the extent to which the Scottish additional support needs system undermines or reinforces existing social and economic inequalities. Administrative data highlight the inflation of the additional support needs category,…

This paper investigates how the narratives Special Educational Needs Co-ordinators (SENCOs) tell can be framed as social, discursive practices and performances of identity by analysing accounts offered in focus groups and life history interviews. I explore how the narratives deployed demonstrate an engagement with a rhetoric about who works in…

This article presents a critical rhetorical analysis of the governing and reform ideology of the Norwegian school system of the 1990s. It uses Karl Popper's "The Open Society and its Enemies" as a critical resource in the reading of the reforms, and discusses some of the consequences of the regime's models of leadership and public…

This article explores policy development for under-fives and its implementation in nursery schools in the first two decades of the twentieth century and draws parallels with current policy initiatives such as Sure Start and the "Troubled Families" programme. It interrogates how discourse on British racial health shaped policy and…

Logical reasoning skills are important for a successful mathematical learning and in students' future career. These skills are essential for a primary school teacher, because they need to explain solving methods and solutions to their pupils. In this research we studied pre-service primary school teachers' logical reasoning skills. The results…

This article presents selective findings from an ongoing study that investigates rhetorical differences in business letter writing between Vietnamese students taking an English for Specific Purposes course in Vietnam and business professionals. Rhetorical analyses are based on two corpora, namely, scenario (N = 20) and authentic business letters…

If one puts together "China Is Unhappy" and the book "China Can Say No" of 13 years ago, one is quite likely to get the impression that "China's nationalism is heating up." "China does not wish to lead anyone, and should only think of leading itself"--those are the words printed on the back cover of…

The book "China Is Unhappy" that made the list of best sellers not so long ago is blowing like an icy wind in spring and is poisoning the nation's mental state as though laden with a virus of unhappiness. Those who are most susceptible to it are groups of underage persons with mentalities that are still fragile and young people who have…

This paper examines recent privatisation practices in New Zealand public schooling. The standard political rhetoric is that free publicly provided schooling is guaranteed by statute. This position may be challenged by reference to two apparently insignificant practical examples of the way in which policy gives effect to privatisation in public…

The UK coalition Government's call to end the "bias" towards inclusion represents a shift in "policy speak" as the new administration attempts to re-narrate special education by putting forward a "reasonable and sensible" solution to the "problem of inclusion". However, implicit in the call is the assumption…