Teachers’ response to a challenge to change: A portrait of teacher resilience to a professional development program

Teachers’ learning in keeping abreast of groundbreaking instructional techniques is crucial for their continuous development of which the ultimate goal is meaningful learning for students. However, research on the extent teachers respond to the demand to change especially on their assessment practice is limited. This study investigated teachers’ resilience on a new educational innovation on formative assessment which is group oriented. The study engaged a cohort of 100 high school teachers joining a professionalism-related seminar and workshop for the expected change. The data were collected from a set of individual questionnaire. Mowbray’s insight on process of reacting to events was employed to analyse the data projected to describe the teachers’ resilience on an innovative assessment practice. The findings indicated teachers revealed resilience to a certain extent on the innovative assessment practice. The majority were open to the challenge to change; it is the novice teachers who revealed the greatest resilience.

French female youth and sports inspectors and the challenge of neoliberalism during the Trente Glorieuses

In a society where the politics of life is geared toward maximizing the physical and psychological dimensions of human capital to ensure economic growth, France’s Inspectorate for Youth and Sports played a key role in disseminating a new mode of governance of bodies and youth—a form of self-governance based on the rising neoliberal values that emerged during the period of the Trente Glorieuses. Representing a tiny minority in an essentially male bastion, a small number of women, cherry-picked for their expertise and effectiveness as inspectors, came to play a vital role in a new mode of youth governance aimed, against a backdrop of social control, at encouraging young people to assume greater self-responsibility and to take ownership of their physical education and activities. Guided by research in the human and social sciences as a basis for rethinking how physical education is taught in schools, women may be seen as key contributors to the emergence of a new ethos designed to develop the ability of French youth to adapt to the social and economic transformation of capitalist society by appealing to the psyche (superego) and self-regulation. Despite promoting a “differentialist feminism”.

The banality of education policy: Discipline as extensive evil in the neoliberal era

Education is usually considered a force for good, associated with hope and optimism about better individual and social futures. Yet a case can be made that education and education policy in recent decades, far from being a force for good, has had nefarious effects at multiple levels. This can be seen in the growing alienation of significant numbers of teachers and students in disparate global contexts and in the growth of authoritarian models of schooling, involving ‘zero-tolerance’, ‘no excuses’ disciplinary approaches, that have undermined notions of the common school as a public good. Against this background, and drawing on philosophical literature and our own empirical research, this study interrogates the practice in schools in England of placing students in ‘isolation’. In considering this practice as an instance of banal education policy, our study makes obvious reference to Hannah Arendt’s characterization of evil in her account of Adolf Eichmann’s trial. But it also draws on the work of moral philosophers, Elizabeth Minnich and Simona Forti, in relation to the distinction between intensive and extensive evil, in order to analyse the nature and effects of school discipline policies and practices such as isolation in the neoliberal era as a contemporary form of evil.

How institutional doxa shapes access to higher education through framings of ‘potential’

Access to higher education is a global concern due to its dual role in transforming individual lives and value for global economic systems. However, pre-entry interventions to improve access often make comparatively little impact on who attends certain types of universities. Drawing upon a study that examined policy and practice relating to access to higher education conducted in 2016–2017 in England, this article furthers a theoretical discussion relating to the role institutional norms play in maintaining this status quo and why inequities endure especially in elite universities. In doing so, it highlights how institutional doxa can illuminate how taken-for-granted ideals shape policy and practice. This article theorises that institutional doxa shapes notions of who is seen as having ‘potential’, examines why doxic positions in relation to ‘potential’ endure and are rarely impacted by practices. This theorisation offers an important contribution to research on access to higher education as by foregrounding the central role played by these assumptions within marketised higher education systems this enables them to be challenged and deconstructed in order to effect meaningful progress on issues of access to higher education.

Ethical challenges for teacher educators in Myanmar due to the February 2021 coup

On 1 February 2021, a junta launched a coup against the civilian government in Myanmar, causing strong backlash against the coup among civilians and leading the junta to suppress those who protested in an extremely aggressive way. While the citizens, including teachers, teacher educators, and student teachers, have participated in the civil disobedience movement, they have not achieved civilian sovereignty. The revival of the junta’s rule has imposed serious ethical challenges on teacher educators in Myanmar. This think piece will be a discussion of the following challenges based on the available literature: the purpose and direction of teacher education, the security of student teachers and the prospects of the teaching profession. The international fraternity of teacher educators should show solidarity by collectively thinking about these grave challenges.

Hiding in the classroom: How neo-Nazi leaders prepare their children for schooling

As part of the general curricular ambitions of contributing to the development of a democratic society, Swedish schools are mandated to actively combat racism and extremism. This causes particular challenges when teachers encounter students who have been brought up in environments where racist and extremist worldviews dominate. This study analyses four Swedish neo-Nazi leaders’ experiences of schooling and how they have utilised these experiences when establishing an approach for their children’s schooling. The focal point of the analysis is the ideological dilemmas that arise from clashes of conviction among neo-Nazi leaders, their children and the teachers. The results show how neo-Nazi leaders use their own negative experiences of schooling to prepare their children on how to escape both democratic education and prevent social stigmatisation.

Outreach youth work and employability in the ethos of vulnerability

There is general agreement overall about the desirability and importance of youth support systems as being crucial for young people ‘at risk’ to help them cultivate their subjectivities about employability. In this article, we take a closer look at these support systems and especially at outreach youth work in Finland. We focus on the construction of knowledge and subjectivities of young people related to it. We argue that among the good intentions in cultivating young people’s subjectivities, outreach youth work tends to operate as a practice for enhancing the construction of psycho-emotional vulnerabilities and employability of young people while translating wider societal questions of austerity, poverty and inequality into questions of individualised deficiencies.

A prolegomenon to a critical race theoretical Marxism

The critical race theory concept of ‘White supremacy’ continues to be a major locus of disagreement between Critical Race Theorists and Marxists regarding both how it operates as a general descriptor of racial power dynamics in the Western world and for its explanatory power in accounting for the multiple forms in which racism manifests. Criticisms of the concept of ‘White supremacy’ from Marxists often point to racisms that exist beyond the Black/White binary, or racism directed at minoritised White groups as counterexamples to explanations of racism that appeal to ‘White supremacy’. Marxists also often point to alternative theoretical constructs such as ‘institutional racism’ and ‘racialisation’ as better descriptions for, and explanations of, racism and the mechanisms that serve in its creation and perpetuation. However, examples of racisms that exist outside of a Black/White binary, or which appeal to the existence of racism directed at people identified as White, do not discredit ‘White supremacy’ as a descriptor or explanation of racism and can easily be accommodated within a framework for understanding racism that is consistent with both critical race theory and Marxism. Moreover, constructs such as ‘racialisation’ and ‘institutional racism’ do not have the theoretical utility of ‘White supremacy’ as characterised within critical race theory .

The critique of Sociology of Childhood: Human capital as the concrete ‘social construction of childhood’

The ‘New Paradigm’ of Sociology of Childhood famously maintains that childhood is socially constructed and supposedly places a much greater emphasis on the agency of children: children should not simply be framed as the passive receivers of socialisation. The aim of this article is to demonstrate that such a ‘social construction’ of childhood is not concretely articulated and that the theoretical understanding of the ‘social construction’ of childhood is simply delegated to historiographical or ethnographic accounts. In doing so, it advances a new criticism of the New Paradigm and radicalises previous ones. Here, key is the theoretical engagement with the concept of ‘human capital’: foregrounding its critique, this article proposes the link between ‘human capital’ as a neoliberal version of labour power and the concept of socialisation. The aim is to show that the ‘social construction’ of childhood is central, but the New Paradigm uses categories that are at the same time founded on neo-liberal views and abstracted from concrete social relations. This article maintains that a concrete critique of processes of socialisation (which is here understood as the socialisation of childhood as human capital) is needed instead of abstract critique of reified childhood. Two alternative pedagogical practices are used to provide an example of such a concrete critique.

The everyday traumas of neoliberalism in women teachers’ bodies: Lived experiences of the teacher who is never good enough

A teacher’s ability to feel successful – some might even say good – in today’s education system relies on a particular conception of academic success. We argue neoliberalism, as it operates in education, is a normalized trauma enfolded in the individual and collective bodies of women teachers producing overwhelming feelings of never being good enough while also not feeling entitled to do what is right – in the moment – for the children they teach. But this is not new; women have historically been positioned as others through whom educational directives should flow without question. Using the lived experience of the first author, teaching in the south-eastern United States, we describe some of the tolls neoliberalism has on the physical and emotional well-being of the woman teacher body in the search of being good enough. We argue it is time for teacher education to become a feminist project where women have access to the intellectual and analytical tools to make sense of what is being done to them and to give testimony and be a critical witness of these everyday traumas that are being inflicted upon them, their students and others collectively in schools.