Navigating Precarity In Educational Contexts

This volume offers a timely collection of research-based studies that engage with contemporary conditions of precarity across an array of locations, exploring how it is understood, experienced, and acted upon by educators in schools, universities, and nonformal educational spaces. Precarity presents as layered, unpredictable, destabilizing, and rapidly shifting sociopolitical and economic dynamics, shown here in various forms, including the global pandemic, divisive populist politics, displacement of refugees and the landless, race and gender injustices, and neoliberal policies that constrain educational and social possibilities. Grouped around reflection, educational practice, and social activism, the authors show how educators engage these precarious conditions as they work toward a more interconnected, humane, and just society. This text will benefit researchers, academics, and educators with an interest in social foundations of education, multicultural and social justice education, educational policy, and international and comparative education, sociology and anthropology of education, and cultural studies within education, among other fields.

This book explores the impacts on personal and professional, local and global forms of belonging in educational spaces amidst rapid changes shaped by globalization. Encouraging readers to consider the idea of belonging as an educational goal as much as a guiding educational strategy, this text forms a unique contribution to the field. Drawing on empirical and theoretical analyses, chapters illustrate how educational experience informs a sense of belonging, which is increasingly juxtaposed against a variety of global dynamics including neoliberalism, transnationalism, and global policy and practice discourses. Addressing phenomena such as refugee education, large-scale international assessments, and study abroad, the volume’s focus on ten countries including Japan, Sierra Leone, and the US demonstrates the complexities of globalization and illuminates possibilities for supporting new constructions of belonging in rapidly globalizing educational spaces. This text will benefit researchers, academics, and educators with an interest in international and comparative education, multicultural education, and educational policy more broadly. Those interested in the sociology of education and cultural studies within education will also benefit from this volume.

Offering contributions from international leaders in the field, this volume builds on empirically informed meta-analyses to foreground relationship-based aspects of parental involvement in children’s education and learning. Chapters explore how factors including parent-child communication, cultural and parental expectations, as well as communication with a child’s teacher and school can impact educational outcomes. By focusing on relationships between parents, teachers, and students, chapter authors offer a nuanced picture of parental involvement in children’s education and learning. Considering variation across countries, educational and non-educational contexts, and challenges posed by parental absence and home schooling, the book offers key insights into how parents, schools, communities, and educators can best support future generations. Using multiple forms of research from the relational perspective, this volume will be of interest to students, scholars, and researchers with an interest in educational psychology as well as child development.

Contesting a gradual disregard for the values of Dignity, Democracy, and Diversity in higher education, this volume explores best practices from universities and colleges in Israel and the USA to illustrate how these values can offer a holistic values framework for higher education globally. Presenting a range of interdisciplinary chapters from fields including history, philosophy, memorial studies, cultural, political, gender, and religious studies, the text considers how these values can be reflected in policy and practice across all areas of the university, including teaching and learning, admissions, students’ affairs, staff well-being, and institutional identity. The volume highlights constructive theories, experimental models, and case studies that collectively inform a holistic framework for moral, ethical, and equitable higher education worldwide. Offering key insights into the relevant discourse regarding local and global events that have impacted both Israelis and Americans, this volume will appeal to researchers in the fields of higher education, sociology of education, and philosophy of education, as well as postgraduates and scholars with interests in the transformation of higher education in light of contemporary times and challenges.

This book provides a fresh approach to motivation in primary school children by exploring the role of metaphor and symbol in language and art as a means of expressing insights developed through learning. The book investigates and transcends Piaget’s dominant child developmental theories and considers alternative theories from psychiatry, not least ideas drawn from the theories of Jung and the works of McGilchrist. Using literary examples from primary school children’s work, including prose and poetry, religious narratives, and drama and art based on Jungian archetypal images, the book analyses how creative approaches to lesson planning around metaphor and symbol enable children to achieve higher levels of understanding than had been previously thought possible. Ultimately, the volume evaluates why current practice largely fails to retain the initial enthusiasm shown for learning by young children, and instead offers a wealth of possible new foundations and insights for learning among primary school children. Focusing the primary school curriculum on creative ability, this book will be of great interest to academics, researchers, and post-graduate students in the fields of educational psychology, primary school education and educational theory.

This edited volume explores how Stephen Ball’s work has shaped the field of the sociology of education worldwide. Written by internationally based researchers who are Ball’s former PhD students, it draws on different strands of his work to show what it means to think, write, and do research inspired by Ball’s theory, methodology, and epistemology. The contributions revolve around a wide range of themes including: the ethics of doing educational research, disability studies, the bio-politics of the child’s soul, lived experiences of marginalisation in education, educating migrant and refugee women in the borderlands, and post-Brexit reflections on the Bologna process. Chapters draw on different lines of thought from the corpus of a significant and influential figure in the sociology of education to present, explicate, and discuss a wide range of research projects, themes, theoretical directions, as well as methodological approaches in the field of the sociology of education today. More than celebrating Ball’s scholarship, this volume shows new and innovative directions in the sociology of education. It will be highly relevant reading for researchers, scholars, and students in the sociology of education, educational policy, and politics and educational theory.

The Improvising Teacher offers a radical reconceptualization of improvisation as a fundamental element of teacher expertise. Drawing on theories of improvisation and expertise alongside empirical research, the book argues that teacher expertise is fundamentally improvisatory. The book provides a theoretical model for teacher expertise that is relevant internationally and illustrates the nature of advanced practice in a global classroom through case studies of expert teachers in England. It makes a theoretical and conceptual case to support the case for the improvising teacher as a prototype model of expert practice. Sorensen draws on critical studies in improvisation and the study of expertise and expert practice, and argues that now more than ever, teachers must be flexible, creative and skilled in adaptation. Providing a critical evaluation on how to approach the professional development of the improvising teacher, the book outlines how the improvising teacher signifies a broader cultural shift in the way we understand teaching and teacher professionalism. This book will be essential reading for academics, researchers and postgraduate students in the fields of teacher education, professional practice, professional development and critical studies in improvisation. It will also be highly relevant for teacher educators who are attempting to understand, research and promote teacher expertise and teacher autonomy in education across the globe.

The book provides a grounded, narrative exploration of contemporary qualitative PhD research in the fields of language education and applied linguistics. The chapters are authored by current and former PhD candidates studying in New Zealand, with commentaries from international experts in the field. The book contains ten chapters in addition to the foreword, introduction and afterword. Each chapter addresses a different stage of PhD candidature: pre-enrolment; the first six months, research design, literature review, data collection, data analysis, drafting chapters, supervision and feedback, publishing and the examination process. Each chapter includes a set of questions for the readers to reflect on issues raised by the authors, and a comprehensive list of references. The book is intended for an audience of prospective and current PhD candidates, PhD supervisors, academic language and learning advisors who work with PhD candidates, researchers working in the field of doctoral education, and university administrators in pertinent leadership roles.