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This article uses Foucault's (1977/1995) concept of normalization to analyze contemporary opposition to bilingual education in the United States. These contemporary movements have 'normalized' English language learner (ELL) students by appropriating the technology of language in order to become 'Americanized.' This has become urgent and emergent in educational research, in part, because of the growing number of ELL students in United States' public schools. English-language proficiency is an essential element for academic success in the US's current English-only, high-stakes testing environment. This analysis questions the notion of an ideal American as the standard for how educators implement English-only curriculum and pedagogy for ELL students. The article concludes with a critique of the impact and implications of 'normalizing' ELL students with an English-only education.

Popular-education programmes conducted by social movements are reshaping politics and education in Latin America. Negotiating with governments, they promote social justice while educationally challenging 'neo-liberal' educational standardisation. Moving from a defensive towards an offensive strategy, some movements support themselves economically while developing new educational strategies. They encounter both support and opposition from the social democratic governments in the region. They are at odds with the international bilateral and multilateral organisations that promote neo-liberal top-down policies, and some of these new social movements have moved beyond social action in specific regions and national borders creating regional alliances for their struggle.

"This article analyses the discursive unities which make possible the current transformation of teacher training and our understanding of teaching as a profession, while focusing particularly on European educational policy and the situation in Slovakia. Using Foucault's archaeological method, we reconstruct the discursive link points between the circumscribed, and at first glance, different approaches to teacher training, where on the one hand, we have a humanistic and constructivist prism, and on the other, we find the pragmatic, economizing pressure of neoliberal educational policy. Discursive reconstruction, however, shows that these approaches are not contradictory, rather that a humanistic and constructivist discourse, by shaping a specific kind of subjectivity (the teachers), supports the neoliberal reform of teacher training and constitutes the reasoning upon which it is based. The analysis is conducted by drawing together various components: the logic of the higher education reforms, the changes to the epistemological basis of teacher training, the regulation of professional development through professional standards, the psychological content and general permeation of entrepreneurial culture into education right through to the performance culture of the 'portfolios', which are the typical attributes of neoliberal governmentality, and not only in teacher training."

"This paper discusses Critical Theory, a model of theorizing in the field of the political sociology of education. We argue for a reimagined Critical Theory to herald an empowering, liberatory education that fosters curiosity and critical thinking, and a means for successful bottom-up, top-down political engagement. We present arguments at a theoretical and meta-theoretical level, leaving empirical analysis to a future writing. We hold it impossible: to fully dissociate normative from the analytical in constructing scientific thought, thus showing the importance of the notion of a good society to guide varied intellectual explorations; to deny the political role of education; and to detach from historicity of thought and policy prescriptions emerging from such theorizing, as not all social constructions are equal in terms of logical configuration, methodological rigor, or solid empirical proof. What follows are snapshots of how we can reimagine the historical present, and how Critical Theory can impact the new theorizing of sociology of education."

"This paper explores the methodological basis for empirically researching moments of major policy change. Its genesis is in the methodological challenges presented by the initial stages of an ongoing research project examining the current attempts to establish the first nation-wide Australian curriculum. We draw on Dorothy Smith's development of institutional ethnography and Bourdieuian field analysis to outline a methodological framework for research that has at its centre a concern to understand the social and institutional processes that enable, support and discursively prepare for significant educational reform. Working with and between these two eminent contributions to sociological enquiry, our paper explores the ways in which research can trace educational governance through the production, reproduction and subsequent enactment of generations of policy texts even before they are officially released for use in schools. In particular, we suggest that examination of the day-to-day processes involved in policy production shows how policy texts are progressively invested with institutional meanings and come to instantiate and govern institutional relations. The methodology we are developing foregrounds the creation and dissemination of discourses that support specific orientations to educational practice and governance, as well as the institutional practices that embed the logics of the field."

"In this essay I reflect on the role of intercultural education in an emerging global crisis. Education systems are characterised by both divergent and convergent impulses. Divergent impulses include tradition, nationalism and religion. Convergent impulses (isomorphism) include science and technology, culture (including the English language), system compatibility and examinations and mobility (including the movement of ideas and the internet). The crisis of globalisation now seems to have four distinct elements: the economic recession, the new international order, hydrocarbon and other resource depletion, and climate change. Crisis is an over-used word but these are all fairly potent forces. What are the implications of these current and impending changes for intercultural education? Can schools and universities ever adapt and can they adapt quickly enough? The necessary curricular changes in schools and universities will involve the interaction of political power at crisis point with often traditionalistic epistemologies. It is possible to predict further international convergence and increased isomorphism but not how, or indeed whether, the crisis will be resolved."

"A critical concern in preparing teachers for urban schools is helping them make sense of race, identity and racism in schools. Teacher education programs struggle with how to address these issues in classes of primarily White students. Through a document analysis, the present study highlights how teacher educators can use narrative - particularly autobiographies - to help understand the racial and cultural consciousness of White teachers. Narrative construction provides a method to highlight how White teachers understand their identities and how Whiteness functions in society. Places of resistance, and stories yet untold, are also explored as a teacher educator looks to refine her own practice."

This article argues for a more systematic and integrated approach to the cultural dimension within English language education in a globalized world, with the concept of culture taking on an affectively related and process-oriented meaning. To this end, it suggests an approach for the development of the ability to decenter from cultural norms and behavior that previously have been taken for granted, within a social constructivist framework of learning. The study from which the article is drawn was conducted through action research in an EFL (English as a foreign language) classroom during the three final years of basic education within the Swedish-medium educational system in Finland.

Despite the crucial role of schools and universities in shaping the worldviews of their students, education has been a marginal topic in international relations. In a plea for more engagement with the power and effects of education, this paper analyzes the interplay of discipline and knowledge in the formation of geopolitical subjects. To this end, it employs material from ethnographic research at the Moscow State Institute of International Relations, the premier university for educating future Russian elites in the field of international relations. The paper draws on Foucault to chart the ensemble of disciplinary practices producing "docile bodies" and objective knowledge and traces how these practices are bound up with the geopolitical discourse of Russia as a great power: while they fashion the great power discourse with objectivity, disruptions in the discourse also disrupt disciplinary practices.

The popularity of visual literacy may have resulted, in part, from some school authorities rushing the process of determining school curriculum. This article argues that the haste is reflective of pressure placed on educational discourse to conform to neo-liberal reforms of the sector, and is not the result of a careful and complex debate within the education community. In Australia, such reform has contributed to the erosion of visual art as a discrete subject in the general curriculum. The article accounts for the fact that the lack of careful debate may be due to art educators rehearsing tired arguments for retaining the place occupied by visual art, which smack of sentimentality. The author examines the conceptualisation of visual art at a cultural and theoretical level, and argues that by considering the function art has traditionally played in relation to conceptions of human subjectivity, we may disclose the marginalisation of visual art as a signal of much larger threats to political and economic structures in democratic society. The article considers whether the absorption of 'art' within a broader preference for visual communication, graphic design, or design and technology, is symptomatic of a long-term cultural stagnation.

Open access (OA) publication has emerged, with disruptive effects, as a major outlet for scholarly publication. OA publication is usually associated with on-line distribution and provides access to scholarly publications to anyone, anywhere-regardless of their ability to pay subscription fees or their association with an educational institution. The article overviews the growth and impact of OA publication in Canada and elsewhere. The article also presents a case study of the evolution over its first nine years of the International Review of Research in Open and Distance Education (IRRODL). IRRODL has become the most widely read and widely cited journal in the distance education and open learning community, yet it continues to struggle for recognition by some academics, funding, and rating organizations.

"Online education increasingly puts emphasis on collaborative learning methods. Despite the pedagogical advantages of collaborative learning, online learners can perceive collaborative learning activities as frustrating experiences. The purpose of this study was to characterize the feelings of frustration as a negative emotion among online learners engaged in online computer-supported collaborative learning (CSCL) experiences and, moreover, to identify the sources to which the learners attribute their frustration. With this aim, a questionnaire was designed to obtain data from a sample of online learners participating in the Master of ICT and Education program of the Universitat Oberta de Catalunya (UOC). Results revealed that frustration is a common feeling among students involved in online collaborative learning experiences. The perception of an asymmetric collaboration among the teammates was identified by the students as the most important source of frustration. Online learners also identified difficulties related to group organization, the lack of shared goals among the team members, the imbalance in the level of commitment and quality of the individual contributions, the excess time spent on the online CSCL tasks, the imbalance between the individual and collective grades, and difficulties in communication, among other factors leading to frustration. The analysis of the students' sources of frustration in online CSCL is followed by a list of recommendations to the distance education stakeholders, aiming to reduce students' frustration and improve the quality of their experiences in online CSCL contexts such as the UOC."

"The paper positions education and learning in the context of Gilles Deleuze's ethico-political philosophy oriented to becoming-other amidst experiences and events. Deleuze's unorthodox affective epistemology is inseparable from ethics in terms of real-life consequences at the level of practice. The paper presents the critical and clinical analysis of experiential events as texts comprising a mode of the informal pedagogy in terms of creating new concepts, meanings, and values for experience. The logic of sense foregrounds ethical evaluations of experience with regard to multiple directions we might take in novel situations, which disrupt common sense with problems that do not yet yield answers as univocal and unidirectional solutions. The paper conceptualizes a model of the new ethics of integration as a follow-up to the ethics of care in education informed by the relational self-other dynamics and moral interdependence."

"This thematic issue on education and the politics of becoming focuses on how a Multiple Literacies Theory (MLT) plugs into practice in education. MLT does this by creating an assemblage between discourse, text, resonance and sensations. What does this produce? Becoming AND how one might live are the product of an assemblage (May, 2005; Semetsky, 2003). In this paper, MLT is the approach that explores the connection between educational theory and practice through the lens of an empirical study of multilingual children acquiring multiple writing systems simultaneously. The introduction explicates discourse, text, resonance, sensation and becoming. The second section introduces certain Deleuzian concepts that plug into MLT. The third section serves as an introduction to MLT. The fourth section is devoted to the study by way of a rhizoanalysis. Finally, drawing on the concept of the rhizome, this article exits with potential lines of flight opened by MLT. These are becomings which highlight the significance of this work in terms of transforming not only how literacies are conceptualized, especially in minority language contexts, but also how one might live."

"This article aims to report a single case study of how an Islamic boarding school (pesantren) in Yogyakarta, Indonesia, prepared students for a multicultural Indonesia. Despite negative portrayal by the Western media about increasing Islamic radicalism in some pesantren, many pesantren are in fact transforming into modern Islamic institutions, incorporating the teaching of democratic values and practices, endorsing civil society and community development, and inculcating cultural/religious diversity and tolerance in students. Using schoolyard and classroom ethnographies, along with in-depth interviews and focus group discussions (FGD) with teachers and students, the study found that classroom and non-classroom practices of the pesantren promote the development of multicultural education. Several subjects within both curriculum developed by the government and curriculum developed by pesantrens discuss a considerable number of issues that relate to cultural and religious diversity, tolerance, citizenship and democracy. The non-classroom practices of pesantren offer invaluable and intensive experiences for students to socialise with peers from different ethnic and cultural backgrounds. However, challenges remain for the kyai (the pesantren's great leader) and other leaders, such as teachers' lack of competency, unclear multicultural objectives in both the pesantren's curricula and the pesantren's traditions, and unequal relations among students and among teachers. These challenges must be overcome to further develop education for cultural diversity."

"This article attempts an initial exploration of the ramifications of geopolitical partition for identity in the context of children and their education. While not an exhaustive definition, partitions may be observed to follow armed conflict between human collectivities (nation-states, putative nations, ethnic groups, etc.) and are the outcome of treaties, armistices and unilateral action. Furthermore, a comparative and historical overview suggests that such macro-political action has clear micro-sociological impact, not least upon children and their families. While there may be some overlap with the creation of refugees this is by no means an automatic outcome of partition. On the other hand, an 'imagined community' with refugee status may be a consequence of conflict, the drafting of new geopolitical boundaries together with voluntary or forced migration. Here, in the context of children's education, questions are posed regarding the disintegration of collective identity, the construction of otherness and the formation of new identities as manifested, inter alia, in the dynamics of nationality, language and religion. Inevitably, while the consequences of partitions set challenges for the possibility for intercultural dialogue they may also establish the possibility of new opportunities for the development of more inclusive identities."

New Labour came to power with a stated commitment to 'education, education, education' and confirmed quickly that this commitment included a greater role for business in the modernization of state schools. One important, yet under-researched, element of d

Understanding state-citizen relations involves a multitude of spaces and actors, formal and informal political practices and the intricacies of subjectivity and citizen-formation. One emerging tactic by which both 'state' agencies and other non-state actors manage, administer, discipline, shape, care for and enable liberal citizens is that of governing through pedagogy. Schools, universities, the voluntary sector, civil society organisations, churches, commercial education and training providers, the media, government departments and state agencies offer fruitful empirical spaces through which the pedagogies of governing are worked and reworked. This special issue therefore brings together researchers from education, human geography, sociology, social policy and political theory in order to consider the idea of the 'pedagogical state' as a means of understanding the pedagogic strategies employed to govern citizens, both within and outside the formal education sphere.

In an age of uncertainty, one of the aims of higher education is to establish lifelong learning abilities in students. However, different authors remain divided on the question of what constitutes 'lifelong learning ability'. This article proposes the hypothesis that the cultivation of lifelong learning abilities in higher education needs to be conceptualised and sustained through a focus on the constitution and operation of agency. The cultivation of lifelong learning as a set of agent abilities needs to be grounded within the mode of being, a concept inspired by Heidegger, rather than within having or doing. While the importance of developing epistemology by focusing on learning as delivery (having) and interacting (doing) is not denied, this article suggests that higher education also concerns ontological learning.

The Canadian Global Campaign for Education is pleased to announce the release of a new study on the contribution of Canadian Civil Society Organizations (CSOs) to the Education for All agenda. The study, Power in Partnerships: A Survey of Canadian Civil S