This book looks at the narrowing effects of contemporary modes of teacher and teaching policy and governance. It draws on political theory to provide new ways of conceptualising the effects of teacher and teaching policies and practices. It adds a new dimension to the robust body of literature related to teacher policy by looking at three interrelated domains: (1) teacher preparation and development, (2) teacher evaluation and (3) teacher leadership. Drawing from case studies from the USA, UK and Australia, it illustrates how a coalescence around metrics, standards and compliance is producing increasingly restricted notions of teachers and teaching. It shows how the rationalities and techniques associated with accountability and standardisation are limiting the possibilities for multiple conceptualisations of teaching and teachers to exist or emerge. Using pluralism as the main framework, it challenges the dangers associated with rigid compliance and alignment and argues that pluralism can help secure schools as socially and culturally responsive to the needs of the community.

This book offers an important and timely critique of expertise, showing how it is a 'keyword' shaped by social, historical, and political debates about what counts as knowledge and truth, and who counts as experts. Using teacher expertise as an illustrative case, Jessica Gerrard and Jessica Holloway reflect on recent events, including COVID-19 and the climate crisis, to examine how expertise is never neutral, objective, or fixed. They argue that 'getting political' is not just an inevitable part of teacher expertise, but a necessary basis of any claim to it. Across the chapters, Expertise explores how expertise is socially constructed in relation to governance, uses of data and evidence, understandings of ignorance and the unknown, and – ultimately – power. Using contemporary and historical examples from international contexts, the authors address the political positioning of expertise and how this creates boundaries between who is an expert and who is not, and what is (and is not) expertise. Gerrard and Holloway argue that ongoing policy debates about teacher expertise cannot be resolved by neutral definitions of 'good teaching'. Rather, expertise is unavoidably political in its expression.

This volume introduces sociology as a foundational discipline of education. Education is a central structuring mechanism in shaping societies, making it a core focus for sociology. Sociologists study education in its broadest sense – as occurring within families, communities and provided by institutions. The purposes of formal education are contested and these contestations shape broader power relations locally, nationally and globally. Sociologists disaggregate processes within education to examine empirically and theoretically the various levels at which they operate. This allows them to describe and make sense of the ways that relations of inequality are developed, reproduced or unsettled and how these shape individual and group experiences and outcomes. About the Educational Foundations series: Education, as an academic field taught at universities around the world, emerged from a range of older foundational disciplines. The Educational Foundations series comprises six volumes, each covering one of the foundational disciplines of philosophy, history, sociology, policy studies, economics and law. This is the first reference work to provide an authoritative and up-to-date account of all six disciplines, showing how each field's ideas, methods, theories and approaches can contribute to research and practice in education today. The six volumes cover the same set of key topics within education, which also form the chapter titles: - Mapping the Field - Purposes of Education - Curriculum - Schools and Education Systems - Learning and Human Development - Teaching and Teacher Education - Assessment and Evaluation This structure allows readers to study the volumes in isolation, by discipline, or laterally, by topic, and facilitates a comparative, thematic reading of chapters across the volumes. Throughout the series, attention is paid to how the disciplines comprising the educational foundations speak to social justice concerns such as gender and racial equality.

This book draws attention to the new ways the field of education is problematising the emerging and evolving conditions that shape the work, lives and identities of teachers. It offers geographically diverse accounts of ‘the teacher’ and ‘teaching’, demonstrating what it means to do critical research well. Teachers and their practice have been, and continue to be, important sites of critical research. This book offers varied perspectives from diverse geographies to examine how teacher subjectivities are shaped by conditions of possibility. Collectively, they show how critiquing conditions (rather than the teachers themselves) provide a means for problematising ‘the teacher’, while also advocating the well-being of teachers as humans. Contributions offer compelling examples of how critical scholars can emphasise teaching as a political and value-laden exercise, and therefore treat the teacher subject as also being constituted through political and value-laden discourses. Critical Perspectives on Teachers and Teaching offers a provocation to inspire new questions moving forward. That is, critical researchers have an obligation to challenge taken-for-granted assumptions – not only by looking outwards at the policymakers, edu-businesses, and intergovernmental agencies (e.g., OECD), but also by looking inwards and challenging their assumptions about power, discourse and subjectivity. This book was originally published as a special issue of Critical Studies in Education.

How to Incorporate Equity and Justice in Your Teaching advocates for radical inclusivity in the contemporary social science classroom. Including a range of adaptable course materials, this forward-thinking book will enable instructors working at a range of levels to integrate equity and social justice into their practice.

Co-published by Routledge for the American Educational Research Association (AERA) Educational policy continues to be of major concern. Policy debates about economic growth and national competitiveness, for example, commonly focus on the importance of human capital and a highly educated workforce. Defining the theoretical boundaries and methodological approaches of education policy research are the two primary themes of this comprehensive, AERA-sponsored Handbook. Organized into seven sections, the Handbook focuses on (1) disciplinary foundations of educational policy, (2) methodological perspectives, (3) the policy process, (4) resources, management, and organization, (5) teaching and learning policy, (6) actors and institutions, and (7) education access and differentiation. Drawing from multiple disciplines, the Handbook’s over one hundred authors address three central questions: What policy issues and questions have oriented current policy research? What research strategies and methods have proven most fruitful? And what issues, questions, and methods will drive future policy research? Topics such as early childhood education, school choice, access to higher education, teacher accountability, and testing and measurement cut across the 63 chapters in the volume. The politics surrounding these and other issues are objectively analyzed by authors and commentators. Each of the seven sections concludes with two commentaries by leading scholars in the field. The first considers the current state of policy design, and the second addresses the current state of policy research. This book is appropriate for scholars and graduate students working in the field of education policy and for the growing number of academic, government, and think-tank researchers engaged in policy research. For more information on the American Educational Research Association, please visit: http://www.aera.net/.

The book provides a dynamic, cross-sectional, multidisciplinary perspective and dialogue to illuminate the challenges humans face in their interactions with data in their individual postdigital contexts in local communities. It offers unique insights from real cases, collaborations, and projects to extend existing academic theories and frameworks, applied to human data interactions, disadvantage, and digital skills. The book takes the novel approach of establishing co-authorship between cross-sector practitioners from the wider community (such as local authorities, councils, policy makers, small businesses, charities, education and skills providers, and other stakeholders) with international academics and researchers who write about humans, digital skills, and data. This develops an enabling cross-sector environment throughout the book that not only furthers broader understandings concerning data, disadvantage and digital skills in postdigital society, but also shares a template to support others who may wish to adopt this approach to co-authorship and knowledge exchange. The book revisits the Human Data Interaction (HDI) framework (Mortier, Haddadi, Henderson, McAuley, and Crowcroft 2014) through many diverse cross-sectoral perspectives. These are co-authored under the HDI framework’s key tenets of: agency, legibility, negotiability and resistance. These tenets form the main sections of the book, with chapters examining these concepts through both interdisciplinary academic literature and cross-sector dialogue with individuals and agencies from the wider community who work with diverse and often disadvantaged groups.

This edited volume brings together leading scholars from the fields of educational leadership and policy studies to discuss qualitative, quantitative, and mixed research methods in an accessible and pedagogically well-designed volume. Authors discuss ways in which various research methodologies and methods can productively be brought together to expand our current understanding of leadership issues and the contemporary policy context that surrounds them. Chapters provide both practical recommendations for using the methods discussed as well as suggestions for further reading.

A comprehensive text that allows headteachers and school mamangers to monitor teacher quality

This book documents and deconstructs the concept of educational leadership within various education settings originating from diverse global environments. It focuses on presenting different readings of educational leadership via distinct theoretical and methodological applications. It takes forward the idea of critical leadership studies and uses creative analytic practices to present layered readings of educational leadership. The book offers leadership studies dealing with various education settings across a wide spectrum with international perspectives. It provides examples of educational narratives through somewhat unconventional modes of representation. This book is beneficial to readers interested in the study of educational leadership and using qualitative methodologies in educational research.