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.

"Childhood, Religion and School Injustice adopts an original approach to exploring the expression of children's and adults' worldviews through schooling. The book is situated in a western 'post-austerity' climate, where the re-entrenchment of neoliberal policies has created and exacerbated various social divisions and injustices. Kitching outlines a number of related child and family-related injustices and ghosts that haunt the majority Catholic primary school sector in Ireland. He argues that the education policy focus on parent choice of school exploits religious, spiritual and non-religious worldviews for the purposes of privatising and marketising school systems. Kitching argues that education policy favours variously white, middle class, Catholic families, and maintains the private patronage model of schooling inherited from the colonial era. Second, he argues that there is a clear need to publicly engage majority collective memories of childhood, religion and schooling. A public reckoning with injustice, pain and joy in childhoods past and present in Ireland is necessary to challenge the self-interested, unjust nature of contemporary education policies, and to imagine and create an affirmative public school landscape that deeply engages with a plurality of worldviews.Exploring in-depth research with over one hundred children, the book goes on to demonstrate the multiple ways children encounter religiosity, spirituality, belief, and consumption in their everyday lives. This research highlights how children negotiate the paradoxes and injustices of schooling, including first communion sacramental preparation in a Catholic-dominated school system. The book shows how children's encounters with people, religious artefacts and consumer products complicate neat categories of religious, spiritual and non-religious child experience. Kitching argues that children merge myth, heritage and consumer culture in forming their own worldviews. He also contends that how children's encounters with the world raise multiple ethical questions about our accountability and obligations to one another. Kitching frames this research in an innovative, critical postsecular perspective. This perspective explores what can emerge from the failure of individualist concepts of reason, religion, science and rights to offer neutral common ground for education. Drawing particularly on the work of Rosi Braidotti, he argues that meaningful freedom, and deep engagement with plurality in education can only be achieved by acknowledging the unchosen nature of our obligations to one another. He supports the 'becoming public' of schools and schooling, which challenges the colonial and neoliberal encouragement of parents to actively choose a secular or religious school. Kitching also calls for greater public engagement with the plurality of each child. This call engages the commitments that various children and families have towards particular worldviews, while arguing that public education must focus on imaginative, ethical childhood encounters that move past static, self-interested notions of identity and secular-market freedoms.Childhood, Religion and School Injustice will be of interest to postgraduate students, academics and researchers in the fields of Sociology, Childhood Studies, Education Studies, the Study of Religions, Government and Politics, and Postcolonial Studies"--

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.

Anti-bias education begins with you! Become a skilled anti-bias teacher with this practical guidance to confronting and eliminating barriers.

Give students the power of language by using the inspiring ideas in this very readable book.