Revisiting Actor Network Theory In Education

Actor-network theory (ANT) is enjoying a notable surge of interest in educational research. New directions and questions are emerging along with new empirical approaches, as educators bring unique sensibilities and commitments to the ongoing debates and reconfigurations that characterise ANT-inspired research. Ethics and politics are now figuring more prominently in ANT-related educational publications, as are educational policy and the critical studies of assessment practices. Research on digital technology in education has also attracted critical exploration with ANT approaches. This book gathers together articles that address important educational issues while showing creative theoretical and methodological possibilities for ANT studies in education. This book aims to locate these contributions within broader trajectories of inquiry in education and sociomaterial approaches considered worthy of attention, given the challenges facing educators today. It also raises critical questions about what appear to be certain oversights or less helpful ideas in what is emerging in the field.

Actor-network theory (ANT) is enjoying a notable surge of interest in educational research. New directions and questions are emerging along with new empirical approaches, as educators bring unique sensibilities and commitments to the ongoing debates and reconfigurations that characterise ANT-inspired research. Ethics and politics are now figuring more prominently in ANT-related educational publications, as are educational policy and the critical studies of assessment practices. Research on digital technology in education has also attracted critical exploration with ANT approaches. This book gathers together articles that address important educational issues while showing creative theoretical and methodological possibilities for ANT studies in education. This book aims to locate these contributions within broader trajectories of inquiry in education and sociomaterial approaches considered worthy of attention, given the challenges facing educators today. It also raises critical questions about what appear to be certain oversights or less helpful ideas in what is emerging in the field.

Educational Leadership, Management, and Administration through Actor-Network Theory presents how actor-network theory (ANT) and the related vocabularies have much to offer to a critical re-imagination of the dynamics of management in education and educational leadership. It extends the growing contemporary perspective of ANT into the study of educational administration and management. This book draws on case studies focusing on new configurations of educational management and leadership. It presents new developments of ANT ("After ANT" and "Near ANT") and clarifies how these "sensibilities" can contribute to thinking critically and intervening in the current dynamics of education. The book proposes that ANT can offer an ecological understanding of educational leadership which is helpful in abandoning the narrow humanistic world of managerialism, considering a post-anthropocentric scenario where it is necessary to compose together new "liveable" assemblages of humans and nonhumans. This book will be of great interest to academics, scholars and post-graduate students in the fields of educational management, leadership and administration, as well as education policy. It will also be highly relevant to policy makers and experts of education policy at the national, European and international levels.

Re-Theorising Learning and Research Methods in Learning Research explores the latest developments in the field of learning theory, offering an overview of emerging methods and demonstrating how recent research contributes to furthering understanding of learning. This book illustrates how theory and methods inform one another, facilitating advancements in the field, while addressing the ways in which societal and technological change create a need for adapting approaches to examining learning. Drawing on an international team of contributors, this book comprises 17 chapters and three commentaries, thematically organised into three broad sections: emerging theories and conceptualisations of learning and how they drive methodological development new methods or innovative use of existing methods and their contribution to theory development theories and methods that emerge in connection with societal changes Both novice researchers and more experienced scholars will benefit from an overview of recent theoretical and methodological advances in the learning research field. This is an invaluable resource for researchers in the learning and educational research field and will also support Masters and PhD students to understand how learning theories and research methodology in the field have been evolving in recent years.

Critical Race Theory (CRT) is an international movement of scholars working across multiple disciplines; some of the most dynamic and challenging CRT takes place in Education. This collection brings together some of the most exciting and influential CRT in Education. CRT scholars examine the race-specific patterns of privilege and exclusion that go largely unremarked in mainstream debates. The contributions in this book cover the roots of the movement, the early battles that shaped CRT, and key ideas and controversies, such as: the problem of color-blindness, racial microaggressions, the necessity for activism, how particular cultures are rejected in the mainstream, and how racism shapes the day-to-day routines of schooling and politics. Of interest to academics, students and policymakers, this collection shows how racism operates in numerous hidden ways and demonstrates how CRT challenges the taken-for-granted assumptions that shape educational policy and practice. The chapters in this book were originally published in the following journals: International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education; Race Ethnicity and Education; Discourse: Studies in the Cultural Politics of Education; Critical Studies in Education.

This book discusses national school policy reforms in a number of key European countries and shows how these are framed in transnational collaborations that meet with national particularities and contestations. It gives an overview of school policy developments that represents the diversity of Europe within a comparative framework. It takes point of departure in the fact that European countries in their school and education policies have been increasingly aligning with each other, mostly via transnational collaborations, the OECD, EU, and the Bologna Process. Even the IEA has been instrumental to motivate alignments by means of influential surveys, knowledge production and methodological development. This alignment in terms of common standards, social technologies, qualification frameworks and so forth have aimed at facilitating mobility of students, workers, business and so forth as well as fostering a European identity among citizens from Europe’s patchwork of small and medium-size countries, representing a patchwork of different languages, cultures and societal contexts. In national recontextualizations, however, alignments have been continuously contested according to the particularities of what has been possible educationally and politically in the different national contexts. Furthermore, the return of national(isms) as well as the rise of edubusiness and digitalization have been increasingly influential. This book thus concludes that increasing transnational alignments have to be observed with meticulous attention to different national contexts that matter greatly.

The first two decades of the 21st century have contributed a growing body of research, theorisation and empirical studies on learning and work. This Handbook takes the consideration of this topic into a new realm, moving beyond the singular linking of identity, learning and work to embrace a more holistic appreciation of learners and their life-long learning. Across 40 chapters, learners, learning and work are situated within educational, organisational, social, economic and political contexts. Taken together, these contributions paint a picture of evolving perspectives of how scholars from around the world view developments in both theory and practice, and map the shifts in learning and work over the past two decades. Part 1: Theoretical perspectives of learning and work Part 2: Intersections of learning and work in organisations and beyond Part 3: Learning throughout working lives and beyond Part 4: Issues and challenges to learning and work

The American scholar and activist Nancy Fraser has written about a wide range of issues in social and political theory, and is well-known for her philosophical perspectives on democratic theory and on feminist theory. Her work on justice and identity politics has been particularly widely cited, and she has also been active in developing a ‘feminism for the 99%’. Although education has not been a direct focus for much of her work, her thinking has been widely disseminated within the critical study of education. This volume illustrates the way in which education researchers have taken up and developed Fraser’s theories in the areas of alternative education, higher education, inclusion and disability, and the effects of neoliberalism upon public (state) education, as they ask how social justice within the education system can be enhanced. These insightful essays cover a range of countries and topics, as the authors work with Fraser’s concepts, to argue for the development of a more equitable education system. The chapters in this book were originally published as articles in Taylor and Francis journals.