Debates about religion and education internationally often presume the neutrality of secular education governance, as an irrefutable public good. However, understandings of secular freedom, rights and neutrality in schooling are continuously contested, and social movements have disrupted the notion there is a uniform public to be educated. Simultaneously, unjust, neo-liberal and majoritarian education policies constantly undermine collective notions of what is good and just. The book examines how education policy positions religious and secular school providers as competitors for parents' attention, and shows how inequalities shape parents' interest in and access to secular/religious schools. Kitching particularly explores how children in urban and rural settings negotiate the joys, pleasures, paradoxes and injustices of schooling and childhood. It outlines ways in which children's social position, relationships and encounters with religious and consumer objects inform who they can become, and who and what they value. Drawing on the above research, Childhood, Religion and School Injustice demonstrates the need to engage with each child's plurality, and to recognise multiple inequalities experienced by families across schools. Given the tendency towards mass school privatisation, Kitching argues for the context-specific becoming public of school systems and localities, where majoritarian, narrow self-interest is challenged, unchosen obligations to others are recognised, and collective imaginings of what a 'good' childhood is, are publicly engaged.

This book explores how and if the mandate for children to worship in schools can be justified within the context of declining church attendance and increasing nonreligious identification in British society. Shillitoe asks what place compulsory worship has in an increasingly diverse and plural society, and what the answer means for the relationship between religion, the secular, and education more broadly. Through in-depth ethnographic fieldwork from across three schools in southwest England, the book reveals how examining the significance of children’s experiences expands our understanding of both collective worship in schooling and religion in social life more broadly and demonstrates that adult-centric anxieties and assumptions in this area do not always reflect the experiences of children.

The SAGE Encyclopedia of Children and Childhood Studies navigates our understanding of the historical, political, social and cultural dimensions of childhood. Transdisciplinary and transnational in content and scope, the Encyclopedia both reflects and enables the wide range of approaches, fields and understandings that have been brought to bear on the ever-transforming problem of the "child" over the last four decades This four-volume encyclopedia covers a wide range of themes and topics, including: Social Constructions of Childhood Children’s Rights Politics/Representations/Geographies Child-specific Research Methods Histories of Childhood/Transnational Childhoods Sociology/Anthropology of Childhood Theories and Theorists Key Concepts This interdisciplinary encyclopedia will be of interest to students and researchers in: Childhood Studies Sociology/Anthropology Psychology/Education Social Welfare Cultural Studies/Gender Studies/Disabilty Studies

School Food, Equity and Social Justice provides contemporary, critical examinations of policies and practices relating to food in schools across 25 countries from an equity and social justice perspective. The book is divided into three sections: Food politics and policies; Sustainability and development; and, Teaching and learning about food. Bringing together an interdisciplinary group of academics with practitioner backgrounds, the chapters in this collection broaden discussions on school food to consider its educational and environmental implications, the ideals of food in schools, the emotional and ideological components of schooling food, and the relationships with home and everyday life. Our aim is to provide enhanced insight into matters of social justice in diverse contexts, and visions of how greater equality and equity may be achieved through school food policy and in school food programs. We expect this book to become essential reading for students, researchers and policy makers in health education, health promotion, educational practice and policy, public health, nutrition and social justice education.

This book offers an account of religious schooling committed to ‘queer-thriving’ and envisions how queer staff and students can live their lives without being ‘accommodated’ within heteronormative religious traditions. Engaging with queer theological perspectives across the Jewish, Christian, and Muslim traditions, the book begins by situating queer thriving as a viable part of the work of the religious school, and not just as something reserved for progressive education more broadly. Taking three areas that are typically used to justify religious heteronormativity (religious texts, religious values, religious rituals), it engages queer theologies to showcase how an educational approach committed to queer thriving can be enacted in religious schools in ways that are also theologically sensitive. The book then explores how religious school communities can navigate differences around queerness and religion in ways that are supportive of queer staff and students. It takes desire as an everyday reality in classrooms and applies a queer lens to this to challenge heteronormativity and to imagine alternative modes of relationship between staff, students, and communities that enable queer staff and students to thrive. Showcasing possibilities of resistance for the opposition between religious and queer concerns, it will appeal to researchers, postgraduates and academics in the fields of religion and education, whilst also benefitting those working across philosophy of education and educational theory, sex education, sociology of education, social justice education, queer theologies, religious studies, and sociology of religion.

Companion book to documentary film, IndocriNation.