Research in Education

This essay focuses on tensions within Canada and Australia between religious freedoms and sexual freedoms. Both countries have sought to develop religious accommodations for publicly funded religious schools. The essay is also informed by contemporary research related to the experiences of LGBT identified teachers and students. I briefly consider how their experiences of education are shaped by religious exemptions which operate to accommodate claims related to religious freedom. I also consider how advocates on both sides deploy particular understandings of secularism in order to distinguish between public and private spheres.

Given the complex and messy contexts of schooling, conversations between religion and schooling can be ‘admitted’ as examples of the sort of situated conversation that goes beyond the ‘false necessity’ of universal state-controlled school-based education. There are distinct claims to be made about religion and schooling in general, and about the pupils and staff in the school (implied by a model of school as community, like a household), and about the school curriculum (where religious and related issues are difficult to address without a subject that is, or is like, religious education). The incorrigible plurality of life encourages a lively conversation between religion and schooling.

Feedback is slippery, its meaning changes according to the space(s) you occupy within the perceptual limits that define it; these can range from feedback perceived as correction, to feedback perceived as longitudinal developmental. This provocation focuses on written summative assessment feedback, a format that remains one of the most common practices within academic programmes, that has the potential to be one of the most powerful influences on student growth, development, and learning, and yet which many students report never reading. I develop the argument that written summative assessment feedback is the subject of collective disillusionment – the result of students misunderstanding assessment feedback discourses, and the mismatch(es) between student interpretations and lecturers’ intentions of feedback. As provocateur, I argue that collective disillusionment not only risks the negation of written feedback, but it also seriously threatens learning. I draw upon empirical data to illuminate how paying attention to the kind(s) of work the representation of feedback does can contribute to feedback being reframed for participation and offer an open invitation for further dialogue via Research in Education.

This essay juxtaposes the current disorientation about the course of global political changes, the emergence of theories which accentuate the present as the domain of education, and punk culture with its proclamation that there is no future, as premises on which the question of radical theory is raised. Acclaiming the works of colleagues who promote thinking about education ‘without time’ and against instrumental demands, I expect that, in the situation in which we have ‘no time’ to design well-thought political alternatives to the waning liberal democracy and the rapidly growing fundamentalisms, a chaotic and energetic movement of thought, action, and resistance (here labelled as punk theory) can and should emerge as an energetic impulse to rethink and re-act the connections between education, theory, and politics.

Mexico has a long history of tensions between the government and student activists. This history dates back to student protests that ended with the State’s violent repression of students in 1968. These tensions were reignited with the student occupation of Mexico’s National Autonomous University from 1999 to 2000, which ended through intervention by the national federal police. In the 21st century, student expression and activism occurs in the physical world as well as on social media sites. For example, the hashtag #YoSoy132 was created by a student movement begun at the Jesuit Universidad Iberoamericana in opposition to the then candidate and now President of the country, Enrique Peña Nieto. In this paper, we conceptualize social media sites as virtual public spaces, and we employ cultural critical visual discourse analysis to examine the case of student “hashtivism,” online activism through hashtags, in response to the forced disappearance of 43 students from the Raúl Isidro Burgos Rural Teachers College of Ayotzinapa in September 2014.

Critical racial studies of school choice elucidate the worsening effects of school choice policy on racial segregation in diversifying cities around the world. This paper contributes to this scholarship by illuminating how a neoliberal education policy of school choice has created racial divisions in new ways in a settler-colonial city. It focuses on how neoliberal education reform of school choice reconfigures and reifies race as a socially and spatially constructed category, fixing the racial identities of youths. I apply critical theories of race, space and youth to examine how diverse youths make sense of, and negotiate, race within and between schools in making “choices” in the local context of a historically racialized urban geography. This paper shows that neoliberal reforms of education do not erase, but rather reconstruct, racial identities and divisions by shedding light on 59 students’ (ages 11–19) accounts of racial exclusion and their constructions of new racial stereotypes in the processes and outcomes of school choice.

Data handling plays an important role within mathematics education since it encompasses real-world situations and assists in developing critical thinking skills in learners. However, globally international assessments disclose that learners are not performing well in data handling. This article explores foundation phase South African teachers’ experiences of teaching data handling. This exploration is based on the findings of a qualitative study framed within the ambit of social constructivism. Data were gathered via a teacher questionnaire, lesson observations and semi-structured interviews with eight participants from seven different primary schools. The findings indicate that participants used different pedagogic strategies when teaching data handling. These pedagogic strategies included group work, group discussions and demonstrations. The subsequent findings could benefit foundation phase curriculum developers as well as mathematics teachers and researchers in the foundation phase.