This autoethnagraphic article argues that in the study of political education, especially learning through social movement activities, the knowledge produced by the research will be of greater social use if researchers position themselves as 'cognitive activists'. This is because, the article argues, the researcher needs to work in solidarity with…

During the summer, we interviewed Tony Bryk, Author of Learning to Improve: How America's Schools Can Get Better at Getting Better and head of the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching. His work was seminal in the creation of the Framework for Great Schools, which has spurred New York City schools to rethink the structures and…

In this article, we explore the extent to which 42 newer researchers, in the academic sub-field of higher education, were aware of, responded to and negotiated their careers in relation to higher education policies. Participants, who were mainly from European countries, tended to divide into two similarly sized groups: one that engaged with and…

This article reflects on the use of participative techniques with final-year secondary school students in one rural community in Western Kenya as an enabling tool for an outsider to both gain insider perspectives and develop a more insider role in that community by privileging and legitimating participant-driven data. Conclusions put forward the…

Scholars studying the global governance of education have noted the increasingly important role corporations play in educational policy making. I contribute to this scholarship by examining the Assessment and Teaching of twenty-first century skills (ATC21S™) project, a knowledge production apparatus operating under cognitive capitalism. I analyze…

Creating equitable opportunities so all students can learn and succeed mathematically has been a key focus of mathematics education across several decades. Central to student achievement are students' mathematical identity and their feelings of success during instruction. Researchers (e.g., Boaler & Staples, 2008) have shown that teachers can…

This article reports on a study of apprentices in England and Germany designed to explore young people's learner identities over time and in relation to particular learning environments. The research adopts a multi-method ethnographic approach, combining biographical interviews with multi-site participant observation. The article problematises the…

This paper outlines the methodological issues I faced during my research as a "returning native" in an English secondary school. The empirical research took the form of a three-year case study and used some ethnographic methods, as it comprised interviews carried out over a period of three academic years in the school in which I was once…

Henry A. Giroux became established as a leading figure in radical education theory in the 1980s. Not only did he revive the arguments for civic education proposed by the main educational theorists of the 20th century, namely Dewey, Freire and others such as the reconstructionists Counts, Rugg and Brameld, but he also advanced their theories by…