Nuanced interconnections of poverty and educational attainment around the UK are surveyed in this unique analysis. Across the four jurisdictions of England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland, experts consider the impact of curriculum reforms and devolved policy making on the lives of children and young people in poverty. They investigate differences in educational ideologies and structures, and question whether they help or hinder schools seeking to support disadvantaged and marginalised groups. For academics and students engaged in education and social justice, this is a vital exploration of poverty's profound effects on inequalities in educational attainment and the opportunities to improve school responses.

Material Feminisms: New Directions for Education provides a range of powerful theoretical and innovative methodological examples to illuminate how new material feminism can be put to work in education to open up new avenues of research design and practice. It poses challenging questions about the nature of knowledge production, the role of the researcher, and the critical endeavour arising from inter- and post-disciplinarity. Working with diffractive methodologies and new materialist ecological epistemologies, the book offers resources for hope which widen the scope for how educational problems are interrogated, and provides a political counter-movement to neo-positivist, outcomes-based approaches within education. Inspired by writers such as Barad, Bennett, and Deleuze and Guattari, the book makes a radical break with cognitive, dualist, and universal conceptions of human subjectivity and intelligence in education. By taking its starting point as the co-consitutiveness of discourse, materiality, corporeality, and place, the book foregrounds educational practices as material enactments of multiple, non-linear, entangled, affective, and relational forces. It offers new insights into how gender, class, and ethnicity are constituted in, and by, material assemblages that are often submerged or 'unseen'. This book is an essential starting place for those intrigued by what new theoretical accounts of materiality, posthumanism, and affect can offer educational research. Diffractive methodologies challenge readers to take a fuller range of actors into account than in 'objective' humanist methodologies, and in so doing to pay closer attention to what data is. It invites researchers to engage with long-standing feminist concerns about power and knowledge production in research processes. This book was originally published as a special issue of Gender and Education.

What in the digital era is knowledge? Who has knowledge and whose knowledge has value? Postmodernism has introduced a relativist flavour into educational research such that big questions about the purposes of education have tended to be eclipsed by minutiae. Changes in economic and financial markets induce a sense that we are also experiencing an intellectual credit crunch. Societies can no longer afford to think about the role of education merely in relation to national markets and national citizenry. There is growing recognition that, once again, we need big thinking using big theoretical ideas in working on local problems of employability, sustainability and citizenship. Drawing on aspects of Bernstein's work that have attracted an international following for many years, the international contributors to this book raise questions about knowledge production and subjectivity in times dominated by market forces, privatisation and new forms of state regulation. The book is divided into three sections: Part one extends Bernstein's sociology of knowledge by revitalizing fundamental questions, such as: what is knowledge, how is it produced and what are its functions within education and society in late modernity? It demonstrates that big theory, like big science, provides immense resources for thinking ourselves out of crisis because, in contradistinction to micro theory, we are able to contemplate global transformations in ways which otherwise would remain unthinkable. Part two considers the new, hybrid forms of knowledge that are emerging in the gap opened up between economic markets and academic institutions across a range of countries. Bernstein said in the 1970s that schools cannot compensate for society but we might now ask: can universities compensate for the economy? Part three adds new conceptual tools to the understanding of subjectivity within Bernstein's sociology of knowledge and elaborates conceptual developments about pedagogic regulation, consciousness and embodiment. This book will appeal to sociologists, educationists and higher educators internationally and to students on sociology of education, curriculum and policy studies courses.

Nuanced interconnections of poverty and educational attainment around the UK are surveyed in this unique analysis. Across the four jurisdictions of England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland, experts consider the impact of curriculum reforms and devolved policy making on the lives of children and young people in poverty. They investigate differences in educational ideologies and structures, and question whether they help or hinder schools seeking to support disadvantaged and marginalised groups. For academics and students engaged in education and social justice, this is a vital exploration of poverty's profound effects on inequalities in educational attainment and the opportunities to improve school responses.

What in the digital era is knowledge? Who has knowledge and whose knowledge has value? Postmodernism has introduced a relativist flavour into educational research such that big questions about the purposes of education have tended to be eclipsed by minutiae. Changes in economic and financial markets induce a sense that we are also experiencing an intellectual credit crunch. Societies can no longer afford to think about the role of education merely in relation to national markets and national citizenry. There is growing recognition that, once again, we need big thinking using big theoretical ideas in working on local problems of employability, sustainability and citizenship. Drawing on aspects of Bernstein's work that have attracted an international following for many years, the international contributors to this book raise questions about knowledge production and subjectivity in times dominated by market forces, privatisation and new forms of state regulation. The book is divided into three sections: Part one extends Bernstein's sociology of knowledge by revitalizing fundamental questions, such as: what is knowledge, how is it produced and what are its functions within education and society in late modernity? It demonstrates that big theory, like big science, provides immense resources for thinking ourselves out of crisis because, in contradistinction to micro theory, we are able to contemplate global transformations in ways which otherwise would remain unthinkable. Part two considers the new, hybrid forms of knowledge that are emerging in the gap opened up between economic markets and academic institutions across a range of countries. Bernstein said in the 1970s that schools cannot compensate for society but we might now ask: can universities compensate for the economy? Part three adds new conceptual tools to the understanding of subjectivity within Bernstein's sociology of knowledge and elaborates conceptual developments about pedagogic regulation, consciousness and embodiment. This book will appeal to sociologists, educationists and higher educators internationally and to students on sociology of education, curriculum and policy studies courses.

Material Feminisms: New Directions for Education provides a range of powerful theoretical and innovative methodological examples to illuminate how new material feminism can be put to work in education to open up new avenues of research design and practice. It poses challenging questions about the nature of knowledge production, the role of the researcher, and the critical endeavour arising from inter- and post-disciplinarity. Working with diffractive methodologies and new materialist ecological epistemologies, the book offers resources for hope which widen the scope for how educational problems are interrogated, and provides a political counter-movement to neo-positivist, outcomes-based approaches within education. Inspired by writers such as Barad, Bennett, and Deleuze and Guattari, the book makes a radical break with cognitive, dualist, and universal conceptions of human subjectivity and intelligence in education. By taking its starting point as the co-consitutiveness of discourse, materiality, corporeality, and place, the book foregrounds educational practices as material enactments of multiple, non-linear, entangled, affective, and relational forces. It offers new insights into how gender, class, and ethnicity are constituted in, and by, material assemblages that are often submerged or 'unseen'. This book is an essential starting place for those intrigued by what new theoretical accounts of materiality, posthumanism, and affect can offer educational research. Diffractive methodologies challenge readers to take a fuller range of actors into account than in 'objective' humanist methodologies, and in so doing to pay closer attention to what data is. It invites researchers to engage with long-standing feminist concerns about power and knowledge production in research processes. This book was originally published as a special issue of Gender and Education.