Drawing upon the experiences of adult and community educators, youth and community workers, Mark Smith examines the practice of educators who build up ways of working with local networks and cultures. Shops, launderettes, streets, bars, cafes and people's houses are the settings for much of their work, and when they do appear in schools and colleges, they are most likely to be found in corridors, eating areas and student common-rooms. Their work is not organized by subject, syllabi or lessons; it is about conversation and community, a commitment to local democracy and self-organization, and is often unpredictable and risky. Mark Smith offers an analysis of the subtle and difficult activity of intervening in other peoples' lives, of conversing with purpose, and of engaging with people to broaden opportunity and to effect change in their lives and communities.

Drawing upon the experiences of adult and community educators, youth and community workers, Mark Smith examines the practice of educators who build up ways of working with local networks and cultures. Shops, launderettes, streets, bars, cafes and people's houses are the settings for much of their work, and when they do appear in schools and colleges, they are most likely to be found in corridors, eating areas and student common-rooms. Their work is not organized by subject, syllabi or lessons; it is about conversation and community, a commitment to local democracy and self-organization, and is often unpredictable and risky. Mark Smith offers an analysis of the subtle and difficult activity of intervening in other peoples' lives, of conversing with purpose, and of engaging with people to broaden opportunity and to effect change in their lives and communities.

In the Western world, education policy has increasingly become a local matter. Localities and schools adjust education to meet specific local needs, fragmentation and diversity. Globalization and the greater emphasis on knowledge in society however, also embody strong streamlining tendencies. This edited volume examines and compares the way in which local education systems in Britain and Sweden are created in the interplay between common tendencies of change and particular local conditions.

The studies in this book take an ethnomethodological approach to educational phenomena. Ethnomethodology's concern is with the locally accomplished and situated character of social order. With reference to educational phenomena, this means that ethnomethodology investigates how the 'natural facts' of educational life, such as daily activities in school classrooms, are produced as such in the first place, rather than taking for granted the recognisability of these facts and then theorising their explanation. In this sense, ethnomethodological studies contrast markedly with other approaches to the study of education. Each of the chapters in the book consists of a new and original study. Collectively, they exhibit the continuing vitality of this tradition and demonstrate ethnomethodology's special commitment to the analysis of educational phenomena as locally ordered and accomplished.