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This paper reports on a study of students choosing the International Baccalaureate (IB) Diploma over state-based curricula in Australian schools. The IB Diploma was initially designed as a matriculation certificate to facilitate international mobility. While first envisaged as a lifestyle agenda for cultural elites, such mobility is now widespread with more people living 'beyond the nation' through choice or circumstance. Beck and others highlight how the capacity to cross national borders offers a competitive edge with which to strategically pursue economic and cultural capital. Beck's 'border artistes' are those who use national borders to their individual advantage through reflexive strategy. The study explored the rationales and strategy behind the choice of the IB Diploma curriculum expressed by students in a focus group interview and an online survey. This paper reports on their imagined transnational routes and mobile orientations, and how a localised curriculum limits their imagined mobile futures. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores the different ways that primary school teachers in Uganda navigate the boundary between school science and everyday knowledge in the context of a centrally mandated curriculum innovation. The paper is based on a study of the pedagogic practices of 16 teachers in eight Ugandan primary schools that were selected on the basis of having a track record of either high or low academic achievement in the public primary school-leaving examination. The official primary school curriculum in Uganda prescribes that science be taught in an integrated form, including integration between science subject knowledge and everyday knowledge. The strategies that teachers in the study adopted in relating science to everyday knowledge was a key feature that differentiated between pedagogic practices in the high-performing and low-performing schools. In high-performing schools, teachers recruited everyday knowledge as a resource for learning science as a specialised discourse; whereas in the low-performing schools, acquiring everyday knowledge was viewed as an end in itself. The paper, then, considers the implications of differences in teachers' pedagogic strategies for the kinds of knowledge to which learners are given access. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the organization and representation of time in certain kinds of undergraduate programs, here represented by a sociology program in a US university. Written requirements for the major are analyzed as constituting a 'chart' that defines academic time in terms of units of before-after relationships. The paper shows how students 'reuse' these temporal units when charting paths through the university and reckoning their academic work to specific futures. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Government support for the production and consumption of educational software is now a key element of New Labour's education technology drive. At present much attention is being directed towards marketing 'digital learning' to an educational sector traditionally wary of technological innovation. In an effort to understand the social shaping of this current phase of policy-making, the present paper examines the political and commercial discourses surrounding digital learning and associated initiatives such as Curriculum Online and the Digital Curriculum. After analysing a range of political and commercial texts produced from 2000 to 2005, the paper explores the dominant themes emerging from these discursive constructions - considering in particular the limitations of the often ambiguous yet structured ways in which digital learning is being shaped by its key actors. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Department for Education and Skills currently shows a high regard for the potential of technology transforming the British education system. Government White papers demonstrate e‐learning‐based unification strategies that reinforce the message that introducing Information and Communication Technology (ICT) will raise standards in schools. This paper examines the effect of these developments on teachers and pupils, and questions the government’s motivation for change. The introduction of ICT has not been complemented by increased levels of effective professional development for teaching staff in the pedagogy of ICT across the curriculum and may have merely served to reinforce the generational digital divide. In attempting to enchant the pupils, the government may have alienated the teachers. This paper suggests that the Department for Education and Skills should place more emphasis on developing strategies and providing funding for solutions to gaps in the professional development of teachers in their pedagogical understanding of ICT across the curriculum. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores physical education (PE) teachers' views of the inclusion of pupils with special educational needs (SEN) in PE from a figurational sociological perspective. Starting from the premise that teachers' views cannot be adequately explained by studying the concept of inclusion or the teacher in isolation, it is argued that we can only begin to make sense of such views by locating teachers within the figurations of which they are a part and by exploring two particularly salient features of those figurations: namely, teachers' habituses and contexts. In doing so, the paper focuses upon the training teachers receive, the constraints imposed upon them by their colleagues and pupils, and, most importantly, the suitability of the National Curriculum for meeting the needs of pupils with SEN. The paper concludes by highlighting some of the unintended consequences of the inclusion of pupils with SEN in PE. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper considers the principles of description that underpin Bernstein's theoretical language, and how these can be applied to empirical data. The particular case explored here is the relevance of the distinctions Bernstein draws between (i) invisible and visible pedagogies, and (ii) competence and performance pedagogies, for thinking about the literacy curriculum from a social practice perspective. The paper argues that it is the generative potential of Bernstein's theoretical language, and the supple and flexible ways in which the dichotomies he delineates can be used to map out changing boundary relations in a given field, which make his work so powerful. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper argues that the question of knowledge needs to be reconceptualised if sociology is to make its potential contribution to current debates about the curriculum. It begins with a review of the dominant assumptions underlying contemporary curriculum policy: neo-conservative traditionalism and technical-instrumentalism. It then examines the relativist position on knowledge that follows from the postmodernist critiques that have recently come to dominate social theory, particularly in the sociology of education. The paper argues that, in different ways, each of these approaches avoids the question of knowledge and hence leaves unresolved epistemological and educational dilemmas. In the final section, the paper draws on recent research in the sociology of science to develop what is referred to as a social realist approach to knowledge and explores its implications both for the curriculum and the claims that we are entering a 'knowledge society'. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Having first reviewed the lack of a sociology of the academic curriculum, this paper looks back at a period when radical critiques of conventional knowledge were being developed in the context of 'revolutionary' politics, both outside and inside the academy. Interdisciplinarity was central to some attacks on the established curriculum, and the praxis of interdisciplinary work marked the emergence of 'new' subjects such as Cultural Studies and Women's Studies. Interviews with women academics, responsible for introducing interdisciplinary women's studies degrees in the UK and North America, show how the disciplinary boundaries were re-drawn rather than demolished. This paper argues that the power of the established disciplines to incorporate new knowledge, without ceding territory to those who were intent on a wholesale reform of the system, is an illustration of how academic knowledge and academic institutions maintain their essential conservatism, preserving the status quo by limited concessions to innovation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Using critical discourse analysis, this paper draws on the narratives of a number of African Canadian high-school students who discuss the relevancy of the Social Studies curriculum as presented in the classroom. In particular, these students indicate that the curriculum distorts and excludes their histories, contributions, and lived experiences. For them, the meaning of being African Canadians extends beyond the geographical socio-political boundaries of Canada. Furthermore, it is the impression of these students that teachers and school programmes reinforce this process of marginalization by ignoring alternative pedagogies and worldviews. The paper indicates the nuanced insights into curriculum, power and knowledge that can be gained from critical analysis of students' narratives. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper draws on case-study data collected from undergraduate students taking courses in social theory. The paper sets out an approach to Sociology as a discipline that promotes an understanding of moral categories. Drawing on the work of Bernstein, Benhabib and Hird, a model of 'generalised' and 'concrete other' provides a framework for understanding the discipline of Sociology and its pedagogy. A case study of student experience reveals the complexity of the 'concrete other' and how a more personalised and social interventionist account can be developed through Hird's concept of 'inner diversity'. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper is a response to that of Moore and Muller 'The Discourse of Voice and the Problem of Knowledge and Identity in the Sociology of Education', which appeared in Volume 20 of this journal. It starts by summarising and endorsing their criticisms of 'voice discourses' but argues that their case is weakened by their failure to distinguish clearly between the 'debunking of knowledge' associated with the postmodernist theories that underpin 'voice discourses' and the general propositions of a social theory of knowledge. The idea that knowledge has a social as well as an epistemological basis is now widely accepted in philosophy as well as sociology. The paper draws on a paper by Stephen Toulmin and makes a distinction between anthropological and sociological approaches to the idea of knowledge having a social basis. It goes on to use some ideas from the author's recent work on the issue of knowledge specialisation to suggest the kind of contribution that a sociological approach to knowledge can make to current curriculum issues as well as to educational policy more broadly. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Focusing on gender relations in a working class co-educational school, this paper reports on the differences in power, status and control when male and female students interact with school-based curricular processes The research site provided an interesting arena for the empowerment of pupils, particularly female, through a negotiated school-based curriculum fragment of the total school organisation This paper aims to portray teacher/student negotiations in the context of classwork and classroom behaviour and the making of appropriate subject selections, a process which portrays an experimental interaction between students and the organisation and authority of the school The research identified areas linked closely to emerging shifts in female student career options, as well as reflecting perspectives relevant to policy and theory development for the 1990s. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In recent years something of a moral panic has been created by the popular press and other powerful voices, around and about the teaching of Physical Education in schools. Teachers have been variously blamed for undermining the country's economic welfare and/or its capacities to achieve success in sport in international arenas. This paper examines the origins of this debate and tries to locate it within broader critiques of educational practice which have featured in educational and political discourses in Britain in recent years. It also claims that individualism is alive arid well in the New PE and that initiatives (such as Health Related Fitness and new forms of Games teaching) do little to challenge conventional social, categories and status hierarchies (relating to race, class, ability and sex) which prevail both inside the classroom and outside school. At its heart the paper points to the processes by which particular sorts of knowledge are legitimated and defined as worthwhile, in this case for the Physical Education Curriculum in schools. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores the relationship between teachers' general beliefs about sexism in society with their views on sexism in curriculum materials In so doing, it seeks to elaborate on the nature of teachers' ideological perceptions of sexism, sex roles and feminism By analysing sex stereotyping in the school texts of one secondary school for the subjects English, mathematics and French the research reported in the paper substantiates much of the previous research in this area which has found school texts to be male dominated In conclusion, the paper suggests that, in certain cases, teacher ideology could be a considerable obstacle to the development of anti-sexist pedagogies because those teachers who support traditional sex roles tend to resist or devalue anti-sexist initiatives in education. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines New Right argument on educational provision, including the establishing of a voucher scheme and the introduction of elements of a 'free market' into public sector education. The paper examines the right-wing allegation that educationalists have 'captured' the school curriculum and the argument on the need for 'consumer capture' of education. It discusses the New right tactic of privatization by stealth, and the argument that gradualism provides the most effective means of securing educational reform. The paper discusses arguments put forward by the right on the idea of a General Teaching Council (GTC) and argument on the need for the development of a teacher labour market freed from national salary scales. It goes on to examine Mary Warnock's proposals for a GTC and her views of teacher education. The paper examines the likely effects of the implementation of right-wings education policy, concluding that the 1988 Education Reform Act will prepare the ground for the privatization of education and the development of a teacher labour market of the kind proposed by the New Right. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper is intended to place the other papers in this issue of the journal in a broader theoretical and political context. It considers some of the ways in which sociologists of education have approached the analysis of the curriculum and discusses the extent to which their work can be seen as a contribution to political struggles in and around the curriculum. It pays particular attention to the ways in which recent American and Australian work in this field has developed and to some of the criticisms that have been made of the political orientation of such work. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The UK is typical of many industrialised countries at the present time in searching for new kinds of assessment procedure which will be appropriate on the one hand to the goals of the more vocational curricula currently being developed and, on the other, be relevant to the whole range of pupil needs and achievement. The paper explores the impetus behind such changes and argues that the policies so generated embody a number of political and educational contradictions. Using recent developments in England and Scotland as a case study, the paper argues that, despite their egalitarian potential in educational terms, the underlying political climate of cost-efficiency and laissez-faire individualism which in turn inhibits any substantial change in traditional educational values is likely to result in reinforced, rather than reduced social divisions being associated with such initiatives. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper is concerned with student altitudes and views of the certificate of further education and illustrates that the marker against winch students assess both the course and college is school It also explores the nature and forms of student resistance, arguing that for those students who stay the course, the most significant form of resistance is against youthful dependence and the process of infantalisation In addition it is argued that much of student behaviour that is apparently resistant should be understood as a mode of accomodation, as a strategy of survival The paper illustrates that many students have an instrumental commitment toward their course and that in some cases the experience of the course enhanced and strengthened this orientation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper attempts to explore processes involved in cultural and social reproduction with specific reference to commercial studies in a Queensland Secondary School Reproduction theories are discussed and a framework for analyzing school experience is developed. It is argued that this broad approach to the study of school experience encompasses the formal and informal, the overt and covert, and social relations as well as content aspects of the curriculum Empirical data on the structuring of school experience in commercial studied are presented under the categories organization, content, methodology and general values. The final section of the paper considers the relationship between school experience and the occupational structure with respect to commercial studies. These subjects can be seen to reproduce the patriarchal and hierarchical relationships of office work however, a number of recent changes in the structure of the workforce and the nature of office work, have resulted in a number of 'contradictions' in the school/work relationship. The implications of the study in relation to educational and social change are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Drawing on data derived from two socially contrasting primary schools in Durban, this paper focuses on how gender and sexuality feature in the teaching and discussion of HIV/AIDS. A detailed analysis of two 'life-skills' lessons in the two schools shows that, despite the social differences between the schools, discussions of gender and sexuality remain muted. Discourses of childhood innocence make it difficult for teachers to provide comprehensive knowledge of sex, sexuality and gender in the primary school 'life-skills' lessons. Implications for teacher training are suggested briefly in the conclusion. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper I begin by outlining the key characteristics of a view of learning that has been pre‐eminent in the past 30 years in the United Kingdom. The focus of this discourse has been less upon understanding the processes and practices of learning as a complex process and more upon improving the efficiency and effectiveness of the curriculum and of teaching to meet taken‐for‐granted needs. Making use of two case studies, I exemplify a connective approach, as a transaction with the environment, which acknowledges both the contextual and incremental character of knowledge‐making, and the interplay between different cultural factors and influences, including discourse and identity, that play‐upon learning. This recognises the importance of all the different learning opportunities available to young people while lending support to claims for approaches to both the design of the curriculum and teaching that allow young people to learn in formal and informal contexts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article is based on research with a group of one‐year Postgraduate Certificate in Education secondary trainee teachers during their initial teacher education and training in England. It considers tensions between trainees’ prior experiences and conceptions of teaching and their training programme. In doing so, it seeks to examine how a trainee’s dispositions as revealed through practice in various contexts are reflective of Bourdieu’s ‘habitus’. Associated with this, the paper also examines how particular forms of pre‐existing cultural capital and manifestations of biographical identity also pre‐dispose trainees to form affinities and disaffinities within particular fields. Lacanian concepts of the symbolic, imaginary and real are used to help explain how trainee teachers articulate resonance and dissonance during their field experiences, particularly in relation to ontological concerns of securing a professional stable sense of self. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Many contemporary sociologists suggest that a feature of modern life is that the practices and identities associated with ‘place’ are eroded. The local no longer matters in everyday life as it once did. Some national governments are persuaded of the possibility of an urban dystopia of Orwellian dimensions, and have found a response in theories and rhetorics of social capital, citizenship and communitarianism. They have instituted strategies to address an imaginary of harmonious local communities. In this paper I examine one such government intervention and show how four schools in Tasmania, Australia, took up the invitation to strengthen ties with their local communities. The projects reveal that the local still exists and matters, but they also hint at other possibilities. I argue that by working with a ‘place‐based’ curriculum to assist young people in building local networks and engaging productively with their local neighbourhoods, schools might provide important resources for identity‐building and learning. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the social meaning of subject choice in the post-16 context through a case study of Media Studies in a selective school. Students' accounts are discussed in terms of both their enjoyment of the subject and their negotiation of its ‘legitimacy’. The analysis of their comments in interviews stresses the subject's precarious position in a school where a relatively traditional hierarchy of subjects still prevails. It also considers the strength of family ‘projects’ in framing children's educational ‘choices’. Media Studies is discussed as a negotiable option primarily facilitating projections into a new middle-class sense of self-hood. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The use of the Internet in the classroom has often been characterized as a practice that disconnects the teacher from traditional forms of externally imposed influence. This paper examines this assertion by mapping the emerging field of cybereducation and considering how endemic knowledge is contextualized by national curricular authorities. The field theories of Pierre Bourdieu and Basil Bernstein are employed in order to demonstrate the relationship between expert discourse and classroom pedagogy, using the National Grid for Learning (NGfL) as a case study. This attempt to capture the dynamics of cybereducation ultimately suggests how this emergent intellectual field's fragmentation and decoupling from State education forces offers policymakers the capacity to influence use. Progress of the UK government in integrating knowledge from an emergent educational field with its incumbent priorities is gauged, demonstrating the way in which national education officials have attempted to constrain potential departures from unregulated, officially mandated curriculum. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Private schools in Australia are a large, influenced and heavily subsidizing sector of secondary education, offering academic and social advantages to their mainly professional and managerial clients. Their influence on patterns of inequality in higher education and career recruitment is usually seen as a function of their homogeneity of intakes and higher resources levels. This paper argues that these factors become important, not through the operation of networks and family allegiances, but because of the way in which private schools exploit the curriculum. Private schools enable families to exercise scholastic power, not only social and political power. But this depends on maintaining an academic curriculum and on the ability of private schools to exploit the cultural values embedded in this curriculum. success reinforces the authority of the curriculum over all schools, not just private non-Catholic establishments, and through this a wider influence is exerted over social structure. This argument is developed through an analysis of the changing relationship of Australian private schools to the curriculum over the first four decades of the post-war period. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Within the last decade in the Until States, diverse conservative groups have attempted to undermine the struggles of various progressive social movements that constitute the new politics of cultural difference. In this paper, I analyse how conservatives have sought to transform both the arts and the schools into hegemonic cultural sites. I then focus specifically on the work of conservative Diane Ravitch, who has been a mayor force in discrediting radical and progressive attempts to implement multicultural curricula in American public education. Finally, I develop a new theoretical cartography around the concept of border pedagogy, which functions as a heuristic metaphor and theoretical space for creating a discourse capable of raising new questions, offering oppositional practices and producing fresh objects of analysis, moreover, such a discourse embodies a political project which, serves as a partial response to the assault on difference and culture currently being waged by the New Right in the United States. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper reports a case study which tests and develops further theories which seek to explain the social and political processes which shape curricular definitions. It is grounded in research into a critical phase in the history of careers education. In contrast with other studies of the process of defining curricula, the factors involved are explored both over time and at a number of levels of operationalisation. At these various levels careers education was, for example, successively devocationalised, radicalized, devocationalised and revocationalised. Through comparative analysis of the material, a model is developed which helps to explain the development of these distinctly different version of vocationalism, drawing on both interactionist and new-Marxist perspectives. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Since the late 1970s it has become generally accepted among British politicians that the transition of young people from school to work is a problematic process. The major response to this at the level of the school has been a proliferation of national and local vocationally oriented courses designed to ease this situation through creating a 'permanent bridge' to the labour market. This paper is an examination of a course which constitutes a central part of one of these schemes, the Schools Vocational Programme. It suggests that for from facilitating transfer from school to work, industrially oriented education may have the unintended consequence of alienating young people from sectors of waged-labour in the capitalist economy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents a case study of an international controversy which erupted in 1982 over state authortsed changes to Japanese history textbooks. The dispute is analysed in terms off our convergent political, economic and social dynamics. These are the crucial nature of the Japanese state and its educational arm in Japan, the roots and focuses of post-1945 political struggle, the pattern of Japanese postwar development, and the impact of recession and second cold war. The changes to history textbooks are considered to be a state response to promote domestic stability and to legitimise Japan's remilitarisation. The case study highlights the relationship between the state and the educational sphere. It emphasises the political nature of curriculum and curriculum content and challenges the ideology of a 'non-political' educational sphere. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper overviews part of a wider study of femmist teachers, born and educated in New Zealand in the years immediately following World War Two The method used is life history analysis, which explores 'biography, history and social structure.' The first part discusses the post-war educational context through analysing contradictions in curriculum policies and expectations for girls' education and exploring the relevance of these to the resurgence of feminism as a mass social movement amongst 'educated' women of the time. The second part presents two case studies of the school experiences of two New Zealand women who have, as adults, become educators and come to identify themselves as feminists. The focus of the case studies is on the strategtes those women developed to deal with the contradictions in their lives and to trace the beginnings of their political radicalisation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Within the overall occupational culture of teachers, there are a number of different staff subcultures which compete for limited resources within a contracting educational system This paper concentrates upon the subculture of physical education by focusing on one department engaged in a teacher initiated curriculum innovation where competing perspectives of change are made evident It is suggested that coping strategies developed within the educational context of the school in order to enhance subject status may deflect teachers from considering the possibilities of change in their classroom practice [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper is a response to Professor Swanwick's further critique of our sociological perspective on music education. We argue that criticisms made in relation to our positions on referentialism, the ability of people to appreciate music cross-culturally, and the various analytic categories of Meyer, Chester and Keil are all grounded in a desire to isolate the essence of `music' from social and cultural processes. We further argue that the difficulties perceived with our positions do not follow from a belief in the culture-specific significance of different musics per se, but rather from overly rigid and sometimes mistaken interpretation of our perspective. Finally, we point to the danger of assuming a cross-cultural category, `music', when many cultures have no equivalent word and use what we understand as `music' in ways vastly different to ourselves. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]