Section archive - Theories & Approaches

Three secondary schools in Amsterdam decided to facilitate teachers in their schools to engage in practice research. The overall aim of the pilot programme was to connect the three elements of teaching, development and research to each other and to embed them in the schools’ practice in such a way as to increase their capacity for innovation. The authors conclude that this research shows the importance of teamwork. Furthermore, teacher researchers need to be given a clear position and status within the school. Finally, the school management can also help ensure that the results of the research are actually used within the school by giving the teacher researchers a leading role in team meetings and study days.

This paper explores how critical theory and critical research can be used to critique hierarchies of knowledge in academia and society. The article explores this relationship in order to create new opportunities for learning and researching dialogically, a process that the author calls, ‘stepping out of the academic brew’. The paper offers a framework for how critical researchers might begin flattening hierarchical knowledge structures in education, in themselves, and in life.

This article explores preservice teachers’ emotional responses to simulated parent–teacher conferences. This article examines data collected during the teachers’ post-simulation debriefings, focusing specifically on their emotional responses to their interactions with standardized parents across six distinct parent conferencing contexts. The post-simulation data reflect the emergence of emotional geographies between teacher candidates and standardized parents as they engage in simulated parent–teacher conferences. The data provide evidence of candidates’ wrestling with a professional geography. Furthermore, teacher candidates report being frustrated and angry with themselves as they immediately experience an expansion of their moral geography.

The current paper focuses on how the curriculum is governed by comparative knowledge. Particularly, the article identifies how this facet of governance has manifested itself within the policy space of England’s National Curriculum reforms. While international comparative logic within England’s National Curriculum could be regarded as a manifestation of a European-wide governing technology, the article suggests that the distinctiveness of ‘Europe’ is at risk of being lost to dominant global knowledge paradigms which are also an integral part of the ‘governance by comparison’ process.