Section archive - Theories & Approaches

In this article, the author refers to Dewey's vision of development in order to consider a number of the challenges posed to a concept of development. The author claims that Dewey’s view was that development consists of enhanced changes in children’s participation in the world around them. However, the author claims that Dewey's ideas have been misunderstood and misrepresented since the psychological accounts identify only individual growth as development. The author argues that the conception of development is potentially more than only an aim; it offers a way of thinking about processes of change over time—in children and in schools, and how educators can support these processes.

This paper is an empirically based discussion of the relationship between multiple understandings of democracy and multiple practices of evaluation. The article presents certain results of three ethnographic research projects among school leaders in Norwegian secondary education. Using a critical ethnographic research methodology in order to build agency, the article focuses on dilemmas and paradoxes of evaluation in an era of market-driven accountability.

This paper focuses on the teaching profession against the background of educationalisation in the Netherlands. This research project concentrated on the extent to which teachers, being key figures in the school organisation, understand their role as one that embraces a social in addition to an educational mission.

In this article, the authors focus on the work of teachers, which they claim is heavily value-laden and therefore susceptible to ethical dilemmas. The authors discuss a model of ethical decision-making in order to understand the nature of ethical dilemmas faced by teachers. The authors propose a number of scenarios developed from real-life problems faced by teachers in Australian schools.