Empires, Post-Coloniality and Interculturality: The New Challenges for Comparative Education, presents some outcomes of the 25th Conference of the Comparative Education Society in Europe (CESE), held in Salamanca, in June 2012. The central aim proposed for the debates of the Conference revolves around an intellectual effort to re-think and re-direct the scientific discipline of Comparative Education based on the broad cultural trends that influence the internationalization and/or globalization of education. Reconsidering and/or re-thinking our discipline involves studying the influence exerted on it by three major international forces. First, empires, not so much in terms of discipline or governance but more related to cultural, technological and knowledge perspectives. This area addresses both historical process and contemporary circumstances and is expressed through networks, research programs, academic reform in universities supported by criteria of governance and efficiency, transnational mobility, and linguistic monopolies. Second, it is necessary to re-think the influence of post-colonialism in educational models and models of citizens’ education not only from the perspective of their impact on the curricular reorganization of education systems but also of their educational and sociocultural expression. Both forms were acclaimed both in the 19th century and the 20th century within different international geographic contexts. The third component of the discourse triangle is the reconsideration (not only historical) of the impact of migratory fluxes, or better said, of “cultural migrations”, and their relationship with the reordering of curricular and educational processes in both education systems and in the social framework. Education is now in a transition from “monoculture” to multiple cultures in the classroom. This publication is structured along four themes that illustrate the academic contributions to the Conference. The themes are as follows: I. From Empires, History and Memory: Comparative Studies of Education, II. Learning and Assessment Processes: an International Perspective, III. Transnational Education and Colonial Approach, IV. International Education: Comparative Dimensions.

Education is central to the project of individual and collective identity formation, national development and international relations, and is crucial in moments of crisis. What should be the agenda of study and action for education in such times? Identities and Education engages with this crucial question, seeking to examine and problematise our contemporary moment. Through the heuristic of the concept of identity, it specifically aims at creating a space for understanding our current challenges and considering the potential of education to address them. Contributors in this volume explore identity, crisis and education, not only in interdisciplinary, inter-sectional, relational and eclectic ways, but also through comparative lens. The book includes contributions from leading scholars from Austria, Cyprus, Germany, Greece, Portugal, the UK, and the USA and covers issues and themes including fear, hope, refugee education and global citizenship education.

Challenging conventional ways of thinking about school reforms and teacher education, this book analyses how the "knowledge systems" which organize how teachers’ observe, supervise, and evaluate children produces norms that have the effect of excluding children who are poor and of color. Building on Struggling for the Soul (1998), his original study of the day-to-day life of new teachers in the Teach for America program, Popkewitz delves deeper into how the teaching and learning practices of urban and rural schools. Applying an ethnographic focus to how difference and divisions are produced to exclude despite efforts to include, he explores the complexities of educational change and raises important questions about the politics of schooling, knowledge and power. This book provides an original way of thinking about ethnography through a critical post-foundational approach. Conceptually focusing the ethnography of "the system of reason" that organizes teacher practices, the analysis offers a critical lens to understand the contemporary politics of school reform, the limits of teacher research, and suggests why current teacher and teacher education reforms may conserve the very conditions required for change. Beyond its relevance to U.S. schools, the conceptual and methodological resources of the book have relevance internationally, especially given the global important of education responding to cultural and social diversity through teacher and teacher education reforms.

This edited volume aims to critically discuss in how far the national orientation of schools and teacher education is appropriate in light of increasing migration and transnationality. The contributions offer ideas from teacher education research and school pedagogical practice in different nation-state contexts such as Austria, Canada, Chile, Greece, Israel, Japan, Switzerland, Turkey, the UK, and the USA. They ask which empirical and theoretical approaches are suitable for describing the phenomena of pedagogical-professional dealings with migration-related and transnational demands on schools. In raising this question, they do not reduce the analytical focus on migrants, their migration paths, actions or attitudes. Instead, the authors analyse the global interconnectedness and entanglements – each embedded in their specific national and global societal power structures and hierarchical relationships – and the country-specific and transnational structures and contextual conditions of schools and teacher education.

A timely enquiry into the disjuncture between schooling and society, this book aims to examine the specific spatialities and temporalities of modern schooling through which non-normative childhoods are constructed as the ‘provincial other’. A large body of critical scholarship has engaged with the ways in which modern schooling draws upon certain situated, normative ideals of child development and is uneasy in its attempts to accommodate childhoods that are situated outside of this normative framework. The COVID-19 pandemic, in fact, was a further reminder of how schooling, in its current form, is limited in its abilities to address childhoods that spatio-temporally disrupt the assumptions of the ‘normal’ and ‘stable’. Together, the authors of this edited volume examine the ways in which modern schooling, ‘excludes’, despite set policies for inclusion, and how ‘provincialized’ children respond to this. Cutting across a range of disciplines from history and anthropology to sociology and childhood studies, statistics and demography, and a range of research methodologies, from archival to ethnographic, the chapters draw upon these various disciplines in unpacking the structures of modern schooling. Modern Schooling and Trajectories of Exclusion will be a key resource for academics, researchers, and advanced students of education, sociology, research methods, childhood studies and social sciences. The chapters included in this book were originally published as a special issue of Children's Geographies.

Problematizing the "reason" of schooling as historical and political, in this book leading international and interdisciplinary scholars challenge the common sense of schooling and the relation of society, education, and curriculum studies. Examining the limits of contemporary notions of power and schooling, the argument is that the principles that order school subjects, the curriculum, and teaching reforms are historical practices that govern what is thought, acted on, and talked about. Highlighting the dynamics of social exclusion, the normalizing of people through curriculum, and questions of social inclusion, The "Reason" of Schooling underscores the urgency for rethinking curriculum research.