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In this paper, following some brief introductory remarks, I provide a context to this Symposium by presenting a brief autobiographical account explaining how I became involved in curriculum theory and the idea of a knowledge-led curriculum and how I was led to write the paper under discussion. I then make brief comments on each of the six papers individually, concluding with some thoughts about the implications of the collection of papers as a whole for the future of curriculum theory.

Background: Choice is a key part of the culture of the United States. Americans believe deeply in the personal and social usefulness of being able to make many choices. Hence, all sorts of efforts have been made to increase students' options, whether by creating many different kinds of schools and colleges, offering a great array of majors and degree programs, or allowing multiple modes of attending higher education. However, this proliferation of choices reproduces social inequality in two crucial ways. First, the provision of many options "produces" social inequality: people often make choices that do not serve their interests as well as they might wish, particularly if they are faced with many options and do not have adequate information. Second, the provision of many choices "legitimates" social inequality: the more one thinks in terms of choices in the context of a highly individualistic culture such as that of the United States, the easier it is for dominant groups to blame nondominants as creating their own troubles through feckless choices. Purpose: This paper focuses on one particularly important realm of choice--higher education--because it has come to play a central role in the transmission and legitimation of social inequality. Four higher education choices are of particular interest: whether to enter higher education, which college to attend, what major to choose, and what modality to attend college (for example, part time versus full time or in person versus online). Analyzing this choice-making process, the paper focuses on the impact of inequitable access to high-quality information. Beyond analyzing how choice proliferation and information inequity join to produce and legitimate educational inequality, the paper lays out detailed recommendations for what can be done to reduce this inegalitarian impact. Research Design: The paper draws on a wide variety of social science literatures including sociology of education, critical race theory, behavioral economics, and cognitive and social psychology. More particularly, the paper synthesizes sociology of education research inspired by Pierre Bourdieu and work drawing on critical race theory. Although there are major tensions between these two bodies of work, they can be fruitfully combined to both illuminate and overcome the ways information inequity produces and legitimates educational inequality. Recommendations: To reduce the role of information inequity in producing and legitimating educational inequality, the paper recommends four strands of change. One strand involves providing high-quality information more equitably through restructured and much more pervasive school counseling and other forms of information provision during middle school, high school, and higher education. A crucial component of this more equitable information provision is drawing on the community cultural wealth of nondominant communities. Second, it is important to design an "architecture of choice" that simplifies choice making and nudges students toward better choices by such means as simplifying the financial aid process, improving credit articulation for community college transfer students, and building guided pathways through college. A third strand involves reducing the harms of suboptimal choices by creating the means to monitor student progress and intervene when students might or actually do go off course. Finally, because suboptimal choices will still occur, it is important to enlighten student choosers and their observers about how choice making under conditions of information inequity produces and legitimates social inequality and to empower them to combat that stratified and stratifying process.

Institutional ethnography is often seen as a useful tool in the study of organizations and bureaucracy. However, many adaptations of the approach ignore the explicitly historical materialist project embodied in Smith's conceptualization of 'ontological shift' and her assertion that institutional ethnography is a 'reinterpretation' of Marx's epistemology. These readings de-materialize and de-historize IE as a method of inquiry, thus obscuring Smith's unique approach to 'Marxist feminism' and her particular contributions to the study of capitalist social relations. A similar problem exists in adult education scholarship around questions of consciousness, ideology, and praxis; ideology is reduced to thought content and consciousness is returned to an idealist position, fragmenting from its dialectical relation to being, or praxis. In this paper, we revisit key formulations with Smith's sociology to extend their application to the study of praxis in critical adult education. [This paper is an updated reprint of a chapter from Carpenter & Mojab (2017).]

This paper examines how the Durkheimian approach to the 'ideal' delineates a possible way of straddling the dilemma between the normative orientation of 'powerful knowledge' accounts and the critical orientation of 'knowledge of the powerful' accounts. It argues that the normative aims are embedded in the fabrics of the sociological description with which the Durkheimian notion of 'elementary form' is concerned. To see where this enterprise can lead, this paper turns to the sociology of education of Bourdieu and Bernstein. Both draw on Durkheim's writings on primitive classifications in education and society, working towards uncovering the regularities of the world of knowledge classifications. Keeping in line with Bourdieu and Bernstein, this paper argues that one has to make the same refusal to the advocates of an abstract ideal of educational knowledge that is dissociated from its social conditions of historical realization in pedagogic contexts, and to the advocates of a cynical relativism of ideal that rejects any necessities socially established.

Background: Traditionally, direct medical competences are taught in medical studies, whereas leadership and quality management competences are hardly taught, although graduates are already confronted with management tasks at the beginning of their clinical work. With the upcoming amendment of the Medical Licensing Regulations, this topic area will probably be addressed and must be adequately taught by the faculties. The learning objectives in the area of quality management listed in the current working version of the German National Catalogue of Learning Objectives in Medicine (NKLM) 2.0 have so far been formulated in rather general terms and need to be concretized. Aim: To develop a competence-based learning objectives catalog for the topic area of quality management in medical studies as a structured framework recommendation for the design of faculty teaching-learning programs and as a suggestion for further development of the NKLM. Methods: The competence-based learning objectives catalog was developed by an eight-member working group "Quality Management in Education, Training and Continuing Education" of the Gesellschaft für Qualitätsmanagement in der Gesundheitsversorgung e.V. (GQMG) within the framework of a critical synthesis of central publications. The members of the project group have many years of project experience in quality management in health care as well as in university didactics. Results: Six basic competence goals as well as 10 specific competence goals could be formulated and consented upon. These are each flanked by a list of essential basic concepts and examples. These focus on quality improvements, including patient safety and treatment success against the background of a physician leadership role in an interprofessional context. Discussion: A competency-based set of learning objectives has been compiled that encompasses the necessary concepts and basic knowledge of quality management required for those entering the profession to understand and actively participate in quality management after completing medical school. To the authors' knowledge, no comparable learning objectives catalog is currently available for medical studies, even internationally. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents a critical exploration of a reported decline in student achievement in Australia (2000-2020). Declining student achievement is framed as symptomatic of broader dysfunction within the education system. The context of declining student achievement is articulated through a Bourdieusian being critical sociology of education. This is achieved using the concepts of illusion and educationalisation as they intersect with Australian schools, in which classroom teachers are given responsibility for solving social and economic ills. As such, due consideration of the goals and commitments to action in the Melbourne Declaration (Ministerial Council on Education, Employment, Training and Youth Affairs (MCEETYA, 2008), and the Alice Springs (Mparntwe) Education Declaration (Education Council, 2019) is provided. Drawing from these formative documents, the 'stakes' that matter are examined highlighting the potential misalignment between equality of opportunity in ameliorating educational disadvantage and the priorities of modern educational discourse.

In educational research, there has been much stricture of neoliberalism as a scourge. In the higher education sector, the neoliberal turn has been observed as eroding academic freedom and deprofessionalising academics. Early career academics are often described as victims of neoliberalism. In this paper, we take a positive perspective through a deep dive into resilience that enables self-transformation and, potentially, system change. Our paper is situated in the Chinese higher education context where the "up-or-out" system has been put in place, mirroring the neoliberal university at a global range. We--a mid-career researcher and an early career academic--analyse our collective narratives generated through WeChat text and voice message. Drawing insight from Bourdieu's reflexive sociology, our narratives lead to four themes: capital accumulation and self-transformation, shaping the publication habitus, emancipation from symbolic violence, and resilience to symbolic domination. We conclude the paper with a call for sociology of resilience and recommendations for deneoliberalising higher education.

Social institutions function not only by reproducing specific practices but also by reproducing discourses endowing such practices with meaning. The latter in turn is related to the development of the identities or subjectivities of those who live and thrive within such institutions. Meaning and subjectivity are therefore significant sociological categories involved in the functioning of complex social phenomena such as that of mathematical instruction. The present paper provides a discursive analysis centered on these categories of the influential OECD's PISA mathematics frameworks. As we shall see, meaning as articulated by the OECD primarily stresses the utilitarian value of mathematics to individuals and to society at large. Furthermore, molding students' subjectivities towards endorsing such articulation of meaning is emphasized as an educational objective, either explicitly or implicitly, as connected to the OECD's definition of mathematical literacy. Therefore, the OECD's discourses do not only serve to reproduce the type of mathematical instruction implied in the organization's services concerning education, but also concomitantly provide a potentially most effective educational technology through which the demand of these very services may be reproduced.

Changes in school mathematics curricula, pedagogy and assessment, and as a consequence the pressure for changes in initial teacher preparation, are consequences both of government policy initiatives and pressure from unofficial agents such as the research community, teachers and others, though with great variation across the world. In the case of England, it has resulted in strong regulation, including inspection, of initial teacher education too. In this article, I draw on sociological theory to help in mapping the relations between official and unofficial agents and in interpreting the effects on mathematics teacher educators, in particular. The article draws in the main on the changing position in England over the last decade or so, and a case study analysis is carried out of a key official document to illustrate the application of theoretical tools provided by sociologists and others for examining the relations between agents and agencies and on their consequences.

This position paper addresses some enduring, as well as emerging issues, associated with the crucial question of benchmarking understandings about nature of science (NOS) for precollege science education. The question of benchmarking NOS understandings is revisited in light of the often cited, continuing debates among historians, philosophers, and sociologists of science, which are invoked to undermine the current widely accepted, domain-general, consensus-based, aspects approach to NOS. The paper explicates the underlying assumptions of, and argues for, this consensus approach. However, the paper calls for extending the current framework and advances a developmental perspective that allows for incorporating controversial NOS issues into this framework. The paper also examines recent calls to altogether abandon the domain-general approach to NOS research and development in science education in favor of a domain-specific approach. The paper argues that, contrary to what its advocates assume, a domain-specific approach is susceptible to the same criticisms often invoked against a domain-general approach. Instead, the paper argues for complementarity and reciprocity between the two approaches, and explicates how the latter can be achieved. Finally, the paper critiques current calls to privilege accounts of context-specific, day-to-day scientific practice and scientists' accounts of their enterprise as sources for deriving understandings about NOS in lieu of scholarship in history, philosophy, and sociology of science (HPSS). The paper argues that, while important, these can only supplement rather than replace HPSS scholarship as a major source for deriving understandings about NOS. (Contains 2 tables.)

This essay reviews six competing positions on U.S. school reform: a speech from Secretary of Education, Arne Duncan; Diane Ravitch's "The Death and Life of the Great American School System"; Frederick Hess's "The Same Thing Over and Over"; Charles Payne's "So Much Reform, So Little Change"; Anthony Byrk and others' "Organizing School for Improvement"; and Valerie Kinloch's "Harlem On Our Minds." Read separately, each invites readers to join a social consensus in order to become competent citizens eager to redesign American schools to realize a desired future. Read together, they provide a primer on how our sociological imaginations might help us to recognize the value of dissensus in school reform within a pluralistic democracy.

This paper aims at highlighting and interpreting current empirical facets of the Greek educational pathogeny through a sociological approach. Especially, the paper tries to investigate the relationship between education and employment in modern Greece based on the annual statistical report of KANEP/GSEE, choosing both selected facets and sociologically interpreted issues such as public and private expenditure, trends on specialties, outcomes of initial training teacher's profile etc. According to this data, the main political challenge is based on both the decrease of public expenditure and the maintenance of significantly high levels of household expenditure. Additionally, current trends, such as «brain drain» or migration of highly educated people, prove that Greek public universities' learning outcomes remain competitive and effective through the framework of a global labour market, notwithstanding the harsh critique blaming them for «statism» and mismatching with the labour needs.

The harmful effects of COVID-19 on children living in poverty have refocused attention on the complex nature of child poverty and the vexed question of its relationship to education. The paper examines a tension at the heart of much discussion of child poverty and education. On the one hand, education is often regarded as essential for children's flourishing and a means by which children can "escape" poverty; yet on the other hand, education systems, institutions, and practices, often reflect and entrench the disadvantages associated with poverty. Narratives concerning education as an escape from poverty tend not to deal in any depth with the injustices associated with poverty, stressing instead the transformative potential of education. By contrast, largely sociological analyses of the ways in which schooling reproduces inequalities tend to stop short of developing a normative account of how education can contribute to transforming the structural injustices related to poverty and its effects on children's lives. In working to move beyond this analytic impasse, the paper shows how the cluster of concepts, which Robeyns (2018) locates as central to the capability approach, give insights which help to address these two different lacunae. The notion of conversion factors highlights the significance of taking account of existing relationships in education, while the distinction between capabilities and functionings helps guide practices regarding the education of children living in poverty. Drawing on literature on the heightened inequalities associated with poor children's experience of lack of schooling during the COVID pandemic, the paper sketches some of the ways in which sociological analysis and normative evaluation can be linked in taking forward an "ethically engaged political philosophy" (Wolff, 2018) to discuss child poverty and education in real schools.

This paper traces the sociological roots of the 'knowledge turn' and a concept centrally identified with it, 'powerful knowledge', beginning with the work of Basil Bernstein which was subsequently elaborated in a wide range of contexts-of-use in the broad field of curriculum studies. The paper distinguishes different reasons educators have for engaging with curriculum which the paper classifies into 'curriculum of' and 'curriculum for'. It goes on to discuss the particular pathos of specialised knowledge, and suggests ways of dealing with it; and concludes by suggesting paths going forward for bringing curriculum theory and subject didactics into productive dialogue

This paper examines the current crisis in education research and how we might confront it. It begins by arguing that the 'coming crisis' facing empirical sociology identified by Savage and Burrows (2007) applies equally -- if not more so -- to empirical education research. Education researchers can no longer lay claim to specialist expertise in the analysis of social institutions and our 'tools of the trade' are increasingly unviable. These developments are compounded by the dominance of the 'cultural turn' within British education research which has made it difficult for education researchers to develop a cumulative evidence base, leading to a lack of traction with policymakers and a privileging of cultural inequalities in education over economic inequalities. The paper discusses how the education research community might respond to the challenges and considers whether we might do worse than follow the suggestion offered to sociologists that they should take 'a descriptive turn'. Taking such a turn will not be easy, but the alternative may be that education research in the UK will be even more marginalised as it becomes increasingly out-of-step with the developments in data, evidence and analysis being fostered outside the academy.

The growth of the International Baccalaureate (IB) worldwide is part of a global trend towards the internationalisation of education (IE). Its implementation, nonetheless, takes different forms depending on national and local contexts. This paper examines the recent expansion of the IB in Madrid, drawing upon the sociology of education policy enactments and recontextualisations and the Cultural Political Economy approach. Combining in-depth interviews, document analysis and secondary quantitative data, this paper shows why Madrid has led the expansion of IB schools in Spain in the last decade, an expansion, which has nonetheless remained relatively unnoticed. Our findings suggest that the growth and penetration of private international education initiatives such as the IB may be related to particular social factors, education system characteristics and education policy ensembles, with a particularly intense manifestation in decentralised systems where neoliberal and neoconservative policies foster autonomy, competition, internationalisation and 'excellence.'

Talcott Parsons did not leave us with a global and consistent sociology of education. Instead, different aspects can be found in Parsons's oeuvre in different theoretical contexts. This paper summarises these different parts of Parsons's sociology of education -- his writings on the concepts of education and socialisation, the university, the school, the professions, and modernisation -- and discusses central criticisms and perspectives for further theoretical development. The paper goes on to argue that the value of cognitive rationality serves as a common basis of Parsons's sociology of education and that Parsons's sociology of education should be characterised as normative functionalist. Since the current sociology of education does not deal very intensely with Parsons's theoretical approach, the paper also considers references to other authors and the relevance for current questions and research in the sociology of education.

Recent years have witnessed a heightening of interest in the role of teachers working in EAP (English for Academic Purposes), particularly with regard to defining and debating their professional identity. However, it must be said that most authors have painted a rather dismal picture, when comparing the status and professional standing of English language teachers in Higher Education with that of academics working in other disciplines. Drawing on concepts and models developed by the educational sociologists Basil Bernstein and Pierre Bourdieu, this reflective paper proposes a theoretical framework to account for why these differences in status might be so. The paper concludes that EAP as an academic discipline currently faces some significant threats. However, the paper also argues that if EAP practitioners are to gain the professional recognition they desire, then they themselves must strive to trade more explicitly on the forms of capital valued by the academy.

The subfield of Sociology of Education (SOE) concerned with the growth of neoliberalism through critically analysing its policies, discourses, and processes of subjectivation has made a significant contribution to education in the last 40 years. Whilst this scholarship has generated new knowledge about what happens to people, contexts and educational systems when they are regulated by neoliberal logics, it has also subsumed the sociological imagination under what this episteme considers valuable. The paper aims to challenge this excessive focus on the neoliberal episteme by broadening our research scope to recover the subjects' magmatic expression in SOE research. To do this, we introduce Hugo Zemelman's notion of "subject" to examine how SOE can overcome this neoliberal closure. The paper discusses three epistemic movements: focusing on the subject, researching the undetermined possibilities of the present in a given order, and, paying attention to the evocative and symbolic aspects of thinking and language.

The 'problems' and 'solutions' of modern education are overwhelmingly produced and tailored by the modern episteme, institutions, truths, and powers of the Global North. To find new ways of thinking and doing sociology, this paper will explore the outlines of a new Global Sociology of Education Imagination (GSEI) inspired by pre-modern epistemes selected precisely because of their distance from modern European standpoints: the ancient lost matriarchal societies and commons-based societies organised around shared goods in pre-modern Europe. Using Foucault's archaeological methodology, this paper finds inspiration in these epistemes to outline a new GSEI capable of questioning certain tenets of the modern sociological episteme regarding science, knowledge, truth and its order, roles, voices, commitments, and 'places'. It concludes with an invitation to experiment with a new GSEI inspired by these pre-modern epistemes, as a tool to openly challenge modern (education) domination and make it intolerable.

The article analyses the main benefits of a Portuguese programme, launched in 1996, which was designed to support schools in segregated districts (TEIPs). The first part of the article presents a theoretical framework, before moving on to the main features of the TEIP programme in contemporary Portuguese society and education. An explanation of the methodological procedures applied in the research is also included. In the second part of the article, the main results are discussed. In broad terms, the programme succeeded in reducing violence patterns and drop-out rates. On the other hand, an improvement in academic outcomes is slow and the links to local communities and the labour market are variable and, in both cases, highly dependent of local variables. In the conclusion, the authors systematise the opportunities and challenges of such a "territorial approach" and point out some key factors in enhancing its success.

Neoliberal critiques of university-based teacher education programmes have led to policy changes such as the rise of alternative certification programmes, bringing in to question the role of the university in teacher education. Concomitantly, such changes problematise the place of knowledge and evidence in teacher education. This issue is of particular importance given extant debates about the place of propositional knowledge about children with special educational needs in inclusive education. This paper explores these debates in terms of recent international trends in policy and practice in teacher education for inclusion and argues for an explicit role for universities as custodians and curators of propositional knowledge in pre and in service teacher education.

Slovenia is currently undergoing a process of school reform in order to extend compulsory education from eight to nine years and to lower the school entering age from 7 to 6. According to the Ministry of Education, Science and Sport, the new elementary schools will focus less on the content and more on developing cognitive and social skills. At the request of the International Bureau of Education (IBE), and on behalf of UNESCO's Education for All Monitoring Team, it was decided to review the general curriculum framework documents for primary education in Slovenia from the point of view of the integration of gender-equality goals. According to the IBE, Slovenia was selected on the basis of the aims and priorities of the education system as reported to sessions of the International Conference on Education. A set of initial guidelines prepared by the IBE was taken into account, and the review was complemented by a theoretical framework informed by cultural studies, women's studies and the sociology of education. Given the significance of the reform process, it was decided to focus this study on the curricula for the new nine-year primary school and not to examine the previous curricula for the eight-year primary school. The material reviewed comprises the "White paper on education of the Republic of Slovenia," as the theoretical and principal basis of the new education system, and the primary education curricula for both compulsory and optional subjects. In principle, almost all curricula reviewed seem to adapt to gender differences and introduce equality in the context of one or more terms/keywords: education for tolerance, intercultural education, discrimination, stereotypes, prejudices, social differences, human rights, solidarity, etc. It can be concluded that, on the declarative level, curricula do not betray any vivid preconceptions with gender roles; the majority of them, however, do not provide concrete examples of how to avoid stereotyping or how to recognizeit. They, in fact, present some attitudes as "natural" or "common-sense". (Contains 1 table, 2 notes and 7 online resources.)

This article updates and extends research by Baker and Chin, who tracked changes in studies published in Teaching Sociology from 1973 to 1983 (Baker) and 1984 to 1999 (Chin). The current study traces manuscripts published in "Teaching Sociology" from 2000 to 2009. We examine both who publishes in the journal and what gets published. In particular, we explore change in the systematic assessment of teaching methods and techniques since Baker's and Chin's studies and the extent to which publications in "Teaching Sociology" reflect improved assessment. We find that while there has been improvement, not all articles reflect the growing scholarship of teaching and learning (SoTL) movement. While the mission of "Teaching Sociology" is to publish materials that would be "helpful to the discipline's teachers" (see the journal's mission statement at http://asanet.org/journals/ts/index.cfm), the most useful information is arguably that which is supported by the kind of systematic assessment that SoTL requires. We also discuss implications for assessment and sociological SoTL. (Contains 6 tables and 3 notes.)

In extant research, the concept of student engagement refers to individual behavioural patterns and traits. Recent research indicates that engagement not only should be related to the individual but also should be anchored in the social context. This ethnographic field study of students and teachers in a Danish vocational education and training school responds to the need for more knowledge on this theme by exploring the social dynamics of engagement perceptions. Results show that teachers and students held diverging perceptions of student engagement that rested on educational goals as well as goals related to the perceived future work settings. The misrecognition of the students' perception of engagement had direct negative consequences for student performance and school attachment. The implications of the findings are discussed in detail. (Contains 1 table.)

Purpose: This paper aims to discuss Walter Benjamin's Critical Theory and William Corsaro's Sociology of Childhood contributions to a Human Rights Education approach with children. Our intent is to investigate how children's personal experiences can enrich the construction of a differentiated pedagogical model, based on the promotion of attitudes and values infused in the human rights tradition. Approach: We address this paper to a reflection on the expressions of agency, social engagement, and cultural productions in the course of childhood. Findings: Our thesis is that Human Rights Education has to recognize the different ethical lives, or subcultures, that compose each educational environment, assuring children's autonomy and social protagonism in the process of identifying human rights violations and organizing strategies to assure social justice.

This study investigates the emergence and supply-demand dynamics of a market for low-fee private schools (LFPS) at the level of early childhood care and education (ECCE) in a slum of Lusaka, Zambia. Based on data collection over 1.5 years, the study reveals that, despite a government policy to support ECCE, over 90% of ECCE centers are private; that school operators tend to be former teachers, businessmen/women, and religious leaders; and that LFPSs charge, on average, 2.5 times as much as government ECCE centers for tuition, not including additional indirect costs. The paper discusses how teachers in LFPSs are caught in the middle, making less than the average income earned by others in the surrounding slum, and are unable to afford LFPS fees themselves. Importantly, the paper highlights that lower income quintiles spend a greater percentage of their income on ECCE, and that a majority of families in the study must make tradeoffs between ECCE, food, housing, and other basic expenditures in order to afford private ECCE, which is a necessity given the inadequate supply of government ECCE centers. In addition to addressing school strategies for keeping costs down, this study reports on parental decision-making when it comes to school selection. Finally, beyond a straight market analysis of LFPSs at the ECCE level in Zambia, this article also comments on how this market fits into the dialectical nature of local and global contexts. That is, it draws attention to the workings of the Zambian state and its precarious position in the global capitalist economy.

The agency of international students has long been neglected and undertheorised, though recent literature indicates that this has started to change. This paper systematically reviews 51 studies that address student agency in international higher education. Focusing on research published in the last two decades (2000–2020), the review draws on studies that foreground student voices, or international students' perspectives, rather than the perspectives of teachers, administrators or policymakers. A detailed discussion of how international student agency is positioned in the literature found that agency appears as either: a research object, as part of a theoretical or conceptual framework, or an emergent finding. Furthermore, our analysis suggests that the term "agency" is often used as a buzzword rather than as a fleshed-out concept. Thus, drawing on this initial analysis, the review synthesises varying but overlapping conceptualisations of international student agency in the literature into an integrative framework. Implications for future research are drawn, based on our findings about the understudied populations and methodological limitations in the literature. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The onset of the COVID-19 pandemic in March 2020 forced Higher Education Institutions (HEIs) to quickly reimagine and rethink how lectures and tutorials would continue, how students would be assessed and progressed and how standards would be maintained. This paper focuses on the pedagogical lessons learned from the online pivot in 2020 and how that learning was then harnessed in the 2020-2021 academic year in the reconceptualization and redesign of a Sociology of Education module in one HEI in Ireland. The module was scaffolded by the TPACK framework (Mishra, P., and M. J. Koehler. 2006. "Technological Pedagogical Content Knowledge: A Framework for Teacher Knowledge." "Teachers College Record" 108 (6): 1017-1054), which supported dynamic teaching, learning and assessment approach delivered using both synchronous and asynchronous pedagogies. The paper explores levels and types of student engagement, student outputs across both synchronous and asynchronous elements of the module and how the overall module design impacted positively on student outcomes and student engagement. The provision of multiple points of engagement/tasks for students both synchronously and asynchronously ensured an inclusive strengths-based approach where students felt comfortable and confident enough to engage, articulate themselves and contribute to the module.

Having teaching staff with didactic qualifications in university teaching leads to a measurable improvement in academic skills among students. Previous recommendations on the type and scope of medical didactic qualification measures primarily apply to teaching staff at university and in-patient settings. The situation of primary care medicine, which often employs external lecturers and whose teaching takes place to a considerable extent in decentralized training facilities (teaching practices) is not adequately addressed. Taking into account a survey on the status quo at higher education institutions for General Practice in Germany, recommendations for min- imum standards are made, based on national and international recom- mendations on the content and scope of medical didactic qualification measures. These recommendations include preliminary work by the Personnel and Organizational Development in Teaching (POiL) Committee of the Society for Medical Education (GMA), the MedicalTeachingNetwork (MDN), the Society of University Teaching Staff in General Medicine (GHA) as well as the experiences of the committee members, who hail from the field of general medicine, internal medicine and pediatrics amongst others. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the concept of social connectedness and its relevance for teachers of physical education. The relevance of social connectedness is demonstrated, first, through its incorporation in a variety of New Zealand's policies and documents particularly where young people are the focus, and second, through research in education that demonstrates the importance of social connectedness for healthy development and school functioning. Finally, the implications for schools and physical education are explored and teachers are challenged to consider how their practices allow opportunities for connecting through physical education. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores the context of a Kindergarten team in a suburban P-3 school in Wisconsin developing literacy coaching support. Facing recent neoliberal accountability reforms that have greatly expanded teacher competition, dismantled teachers' unions, and added the role of the coach to the school, "confidence" is an issue that the coach and teachers struggle with as they seek to improve minority student achievement. Using a case study design and feminist sociological framework highlighting emotional labour, the affective economy, and the psychosocial possibilities of the work of Pierre Bourdieu, this research examines professional capital as a form of educators' experience. Ultimately, we see that the landscape of power and emotions is complex as it divides "good" and "bad" White and middle-class teachers. Possibilities for extending the uses of feminist sociological theory in early childhood literacy are discussed.

In this special issue response paper, we pick up from prior discussions to suggest areas where we think policy sociology can benefit from further conversation and research. In particular, we bring together our respective readings and work on policy mobilities, in conversation with the contributions of this special issue, to think further about what policy mobilities and related orientations can bring to the development of policy sociology. We specifically focus our attention on four areas for further conceptual and methodological extension in relation to policy mobilities and related approaches in policy sociology of education: (1) temporality; (2) scale; (3) land; and, finally, (4) methodological diversity. In doing so, we advocate against 'fast' readings of literature from other fields, while emphasizing the value of transdisciplinary work in policy sociology and critical policy studies.

This paper reflects critically upon how the 'mobilities turn' in the social sciences, and its subsequent contribution towards 'policy mobilities', offers theoretical and methodological resources that can be usefully harnessed in education policy sociology. Just as there are new ways in which policy is being made and moved, there are equally new ways to "be" a researcher of education policy who seeks to understand these processes. My purpose here is to help crystallise and make explicit these new mobilities-informed approaches, not only for the purpose of considering how mobility can help reconsider how to think and practise policy sociology, but also to better reflect and accommodate the empirical changes inherent in contemporary policymaking and enactment. I first survey the literature around the mobilities turn and emphasise its implications for social science research, before turning to how policy mobilities theories and methodologies can be employed within policy sociology. Finally, I close the paper by reflecting on the implications of conducting policy sociology with a policy mobility lens and outline the issues that come from foregrounding movement in the research of education policy.

This paper revisits and reassesses the influence of the context of production on the origin, development and use of the term 'policy sociology' in research in the sociology of education in the UK from the 1980s to the contemporary period. Starting with the first use of the term 'policy sociology,' and its definition as 'rooted in social science tradition, historically informed and drawing on qualitative and illuminative techniques', the paper considers the established knowledge production traditions in education policy studies that policy sociology was responding to in the 1970s and 1980s in the UK. It foregrounds the implication of a critical stance towards policy contained in that usage, as well as considering what was and is meant by the term critical in the now dominant usage (critical policy sociology), before considering how policy was and is defined, and the specific and particular contribution that sociological enquiry can make to the study of education policy.

This paper argues that more focus on the temporal is needed in critical policy sociology in education. In so asserting, the paper extends the concept of 'historically informed' as included in the foundational definition of policy sociology in education proffered by Jenny Ozga. There are four foci to this extension to encompass the temporal, taken to refer to the complex relationships between past, present and future, namely: the changing historical concept/definition of policy; policy histories; the temporal construction work of policies; and changing spatio-temporalities and timespaces of policy in the context of globalization. To a considerable extent these have been neglected in policy sociology in education research and theorising and as such demand new research and theoretical work in the field. Looking back in time will help us understand the present and possible futures.

The concept of social capital has become in recent decades one of the most powerful ideas in social science. Having its roots in sociology and economics, it has consistently "settled" in almost all fields that deal with human functioning--pedagogy, social work, social anthropology, history, health sciences. This multiplicity of approaches and uses stems, on the one hand, from the diversity of topics and issues to which the term "social capital" is applied. On the other hand, it is the result of different theoretical sources of social capital conceptualization. As a consequence, different researchers, when using the term "social capital", have in mind slightly different elements of social reality. It has consequences in the educational research, and leads to a large number of studies using the category of social capital in relation to school, but their results do not seem to form a coherent picture, sometimes even leading to contradictory conclusions. The question arises whether it is possible to build a synthesized analytical perspective, using the notion of social capital in such a way as to make this category a really useful tool for analyzing educational reality. The paper is an attempt to present such perspective by development of two ideal types of the structural conditions for education (schooling). First, the author presents the understanding of social capital in regard to education in four theoretical contexts: James Coleman's theory of exchange, Robert D. Putnam's theory of civil society, Pierre Bourdieu's theory of cultural structuralism and the network theory. Next, the text presents different analytical strategies resulting from the adoption of a given theoretical perspective. In the last part of the paper attempt was made to construct two ideal types of structural conditions for education, which seem to be possible to read from the results of research conducted with the use of different conceptualizations of social capital.

This paper critiques the emergence of micro-credentials in higher education. It argues that micro-credentials build on the discourse of employability skills and 21st century skills within human capital theory, and that they increase the potential of human capital theory to 'discipline' the HE curriculum to align it more closely with putative labour market requirements. The paper is situated within the social realist school in the sociology of education, and it draws primarily on the sociology of Basil Bernstein to develop this critique, while also drawing on the Continental "Didaktik" tradition. It analyses the nature of the person envisaged in curriculum, the "homo economicus" of human capital theory. This self is a market self who uses micro-credentials to invest in this or that set of skills in anticipating labour market requirements. The paper uses a range of Bernstein's concepts to analyse the links between what is to be taught, to whom is it taught, and how is it taught in micro-credentials. It focuses on the principle of recontextualization which comprises instructional and regulative discourses, to examine the ways in which notions of the person and human motivation are reshaping relations of classification and framing in HE curriculum.

As sociologists with a keen interest in supporting anti-racist research and educational initiatives, Dr. Taylor's paper providing Stuart Whigham and Jason Arday with an engaging and insightful interest to a contrasting disciplinary approach to achieving equality in educational outcomes for Black students through her psychologically-informed analysis. They laud her commitment her to a theoretically-driven account of her attempts to enact anti-racist practice in her field of work, with an illuminating analysis of the potential utility of Ryan and Deci's (2000) 'self-determination theory' to frame her emergent findings. Furthermore, Dr. Taylor's willingness to both acknowledge and share her privileged position as a White female within her academic field and, in particular, her appreciation of the importance of adopting a reflexive position within the course of her engagement with her Black student population and research participants. Therefore, they found Dr. Taylor's work to be a highly informative account which demonstrates the clear utility of a psychological approach to the issue at hand, their response to the paper will attempt to illustrate the contrasting benefits of a sociological analysis of the emergent data and issues accounted for in Taylor's paper. In this article, they hope to demonstrate the benefits of a multi-disciplinary approach to the study of racism and anti-racism in education, thus engaging with Dr. Taylor's account in a constructive yet contrasting analytical dialogue. [For the original article, "Seeking Equality of Educational Outcomes for Black Students: A Personal Account," see EJ1316951.]

Drawing on various disciplinary and scholarly approaches to the multiple roles of higher education in society, this paper offers a new conceptualisation of the non-economic contributions of higher education. The conceptual model identifies two basic dimensions in higher education's contributions to society. The first, axiological dimension pertains to the objects of higher education: what higher education does, what is in the centre of its activities. This includes three key elements: knowledge/skills (basic and applied knowledge, generic and particular skills), norms and values (social, cultural, professional, civic) and social value (social statuses). The second, praxeological dimension pertains to the internal dynamics of higher education: what higher education does in relation to the object, the processes, practices, activities. This entails three: transmission, transformation and creation. The resulting model combines the two dimensions (axiological and praxeological), identifying nine key domains of the contributions of higher education to society. This conceptualisation both brings together the three major components of higher education's role and attends to its internal dynamics. It illuminates the intrinsic value of teaching, learning and research and the inherent transformative potentials of higher education for individuals and for societies. It embraces actual and potential contributions of higher education to society. It is applicable at both individual and collective levels. It works on the scales of group, institution, local, national and global.

A substantial body of international research argues that the teacher-student relationship is crucial for students' academic and social-emotional learning. However, microanalytic studies of teachers' relational competence are rare. This article aims to contribute such a study by exploring teachers' relational competence, drawing on Erving Goffman's concept of face-work and focussing on how a particular teacher-student relationship is constructed in an ongoing processes of interaction. The paper presents in-depth analyses of teacher-student interaction using a video-recording of a classroom episode. In the episode, the student loses face as a result of a complex series of events. The teacher, through rapid action, helps the student repair face and manages to (re-)establish a respectful interaction ritual. Overall, the teacher's relational competence is manifested by advanced and complex face-work. Our analyses indicate that relational competence is essentially a micro-social artistry -- a lightning-quick ability to interact with students in the 'here and now'. The article also discusses the pedagogical implications of these findings, for example, that it is crucial to include face-work in teacher education and training.

Global movements to decolonise sociology have gained significant momentum in recent decades and offer far-reaching implications for the field of education. One understudied area of research, however, concerns the sociologies of education taught and experienced in teacher education outside of Anglo/European contexts. This paper uses post-/­decolonial theory to explore the teaching and learning of sociology of education for pre-service teachers at the University of Zambia. It draws on data from surveys (n = 318) and five focus groups with pre-service teachers (n = 20), a focus group with tutors (n = 3) working on the course, and reflections by course lecturers to examine Zambian pre-service teachers' experiences and perspectives of sociology. We argue that a sociology of education which includes some elements of the classical canon but is grounded more firmly in sociological perspectives related to local social issues, contexts, and epistemologies may lead to a more informed and inspired cadre of pre-service teachers, and by extension, citizens.

Introduction: This paper problematises how children are categorised as a specific user group within information behaviour research and discusses the implications of this categorisation. Methods: Two edited collections of papers on children's information behaviour are analysed. Analysis: The analysis is influenced by previous discourse analytic studies of users within information science and by the sociology of childhood and the discourse analytic concept of subject positions guides the analysis. Results: In the children-focussed discourse of information behaviour research, children are described as being characterised by distinctive child-typical features, which means that similarities between children and other groups, as well as differences within the group, are downplayed. Children are also characterised by deficiencies: by not being adults, by not being mature and by not being competent information seekers. The discourse creates a position of power for adults, and for children a position as those in need of expert help. Children are also ascribed a subject position as users of technologies that affect the group in various ways. Conclusions: It is suggested that information behaviour research would benefit from shifting the focus from trying to explain how children innately are and therefore behave with information, to creating understandings of various information practices which involve people of a young age. [Note: The citation information (v20 n1 March 2015) shown on the PDF is incorrect. The correct citation is v21 n3 September 2016.]

Although sociology education is celebrating its 100th year anniversary in Turkish higher education, the field itself is not known quite well by the society. Familial worries in the context of emotional sociology are very important because families may have when they think of their child's future especially after graduation from university. Primary aim of this paper is to find out the essence and main sources of parental worries. In this paper it is assumed that status of sociology in society and its education are inseparable parts and there are mutual relationships among them. Using phenomenological approach data gathered from 25 parents are analysed. Findings revealed that insufficient employment opportunities as well as little information about sociology are the essence or main reasons of parental concerns.

This paper is based on a keynote address given at the ATEE Annual Conference 2019, held at Bath Spa University, remembering Geoff Whitty (1946-2018). It seeks to make sense of the current teacher education scene, both within the United Kingdom and across Europe and beyond. Reference will be made to Whitty's enormous contribution to our understanding of policy processes in teacher education as well as to the author's own work, much of it inspired by Whitty. The paper concludes with suggestions for a focused international research agenda for teacher education, that is viable in a Europe where the UK may have left the Union and in a wider world where global politics are unpredictable and where the meaning of 'truth' is frequently called into question.

This paper on the political sociology of school choice policies has been written as a supplement to the essays in the 2020 Politics of Education Association Yearbook and locates them in cognate literatures. In addition, the papers are situated against the changing political and global contexts of such policies, as global pressures, discourses, and policyscapes have been recently challenged to some extent by the rise of new nationalisms and ethno-nationalism in many nations across the globe. School choice policies are linked with practices of marketization, privatization, and commercialization and some conceptual clarification is proffered. Policy is defined as referring to processes, framing discourses, and specific texts. Statecraft (logics and working of the state) has been reconstituted by these changes, with one important often over-looked element of this craft being scalecraft (work creating the scales of policies), that is, policy work on constituting local, national, regional, and global relationships and scales.

Building upon the genre-based research in literacy and English as a Second language (ESL) education developed in Australia in the past three decades, this paper reframes a genre-based approach to teaching Chinese as a Foreign Language (CFL) in a primary classroom. Grounded in Bernsteinian sociology while also working in transdisciplinary dialogue with systemic functional linguistic perspectives, this approach to genre is illustrated with respect to CFL curriculum genres built in steps through power and control relations as well as phasal shifts in ideational, interpersonal and textual meanings. The paper identifies four CFL curriculum genres in a particular classroom and instantiates a curriculum genre of Chinese language learning through song that inducted disadvantaged students into the knowledge about language and subject contents. I argue that the reframed genre-based pedagogy, as a pathway to educational and social justice, can help teachers chart their lessons and has important implications for theory and practice.