Schooling is one of the core experiences of most young people in the Western world. This study examines the ways that students inhabit subjectivities defined in their relationship to some normalised good student. The idea that schools exist to produce students who become good citizens is one of the basic tenets of modernist educational philosophies that dominate the contemporary education world. The school has become a political site where policy, curriculum orientations, expectations and philosophies of education contest for the 'right' way to school and be schooled. For many people, schools and schooling only make sense if they resonate with past experiences. The good student is framed within these aspects of cultural understanding. However, this commonsense attitude is based on a hegemonic understanding of the good, rather than the good student as a contingent multiplicity that is produced by an infinite set of discourses and experiences. In this book, author Greg Thompson argues that this understanding of subjectivities and power is crucial if schools are to meet the needs of a rapidly changing and challenging world. As a high school teacher for many years, Thompson often wondered how students responded to complex articulations on how to be a good student. How a student can be considered good is itself an articulation of powerful discourses that compete within the school. Rather than assuming a moral or ethical citizen, this study turns that logic on it on its head to ask students in what ways they can be good within the school. Visions of the good student deployed in various ways in schools act to produce various ways of knowing the self as certain types of subjects. Developing the postmodern theories of Foucault and Deleuze, this study argues that schools act to teach students to know themselves in certain idealised ways through which they are located, and locate themselves, in hierarchical rationales of the good student. Problematising the good student in high schools engages those institutional discourses with the philosophy, history and sociology of education. Asking students how they negotiate or perform their selves within schools challenges the narrow and limiting ways that the good is often understood. By pushing the ontological understandings of the self beyond the modernist philosophies that currently dominate schools and schooling, this study problematises the tendency to see students as fixed, measurable identities (beings) rather than dynamic, evolving performances (becomings). This book suggests that there is more to becoming good than sitting quietly in class and doing well on tests. Students are daily involved in complex negotiations between competing expectations of the good and continually try to navigate what is a very complex terrain. These negotiations impact on their engagement with, and expectations of, schooling. It informs their behaviour, their relationships with each other and with authority figures. Through asking students their experiences and understandings of what constitutes a good student, a vastly different education terrain opens up than what is often understood. This book offers unique insights on high school students in the new millennia. For those studying teaching and for those working with student teachers in university contexts it offers a different perspective on how school students understand school and their interactions with teachers. It argues that through uncovering these student voices a more subtle and nuanced pedagogy can evolve. Who is the Good High School Student? is an important book for scholars conducting research on high school education, as well as student-teachers, teacher educators and practicing teachers alike.

This collection works with the philosophy of Gilles Deleuze, and his collaborator Felix Guattari, in the context of education. Deleuze once remarked that we get the philosophy we deserve because of the questions that we ask. Deleuze saw that the work of philosophy was the creation of concepts - those working with his theory are admonished not to follow but to think. For Deleuze, education remained a philosophical problem because it is connected to problems of language, authority, meaning and what it means to learn and think. With that in mind, these contributions were chosen because they apply this ethic to education to think again about what constitutes a problem. In this book, Deleuze's conceptual contributions such as affect, assemblage, the logic of sense and control society and modulation are put to work to consider various educational problems in educational settings. What brings these contributions together, apart from working with Deleuze, is that they present education as a problem requiring new concepts. Readers are invited into an encounter with Deleuze's thought because of the situations in which we find ourselves. The chapters in this book were originally published as journal articles by Taylor and Francis journals.

Privatisation and Commercialisation in Public Education asks how publicness is being redefined through the restructuring of nominally public school systems. Over the past few decades, governments have engineered a wave of reforms in their public systems opening them to privatisation and commercialisation. In public education systems competition, choice and autonomy have become entrenched vectors of these reforms. This edited collection carefully examines the difference between privatisation and commercialisation and traces the varying effects privatised and commercialised policy reforms have had in different educational contexts. Many countries have approached the thorny issues of school choice and school autonomy in different ways, and this book investigates the impact of these agendas across the USA, UK, Australia, New Zealand, parts of Europe, sub-Saharan Africa and India. This book brings together contemporary, international perspectives from high-profile policy academics on both privatisation and commercialisation in public education systems under the provocation of how the 'public' nature of schooling is changing. This is essential reading for those interested in the idea that current education policy reforms are reshaping what might be considered core educational practices in public schooling.

Privatisation and Commercialisation in Public Education asks how publicness is being redefined through the restructuring of nominally public school systems. Over the past few decades, governments have engineered a wave of reforms in their public systems opening them to privatisation and commercialisation. In public education systems competition, choice and autonomy have become entrenched vectors of these reforms. This edited collection carefully examines the difference between privatisation and commercialisation and traces the varying effects privatised and commercialised policy reforms have had in different educational contexts. Many countries have approached the thorny issues of school choice and school autonomy in different ways, and this book investigates the impact of these agendas across the USA, UK, Australia, New Zealand, parts of Europe, sub-Saharan Africa and India. This book brings together contemporary, international perspectives from high-profile policy academics on both privatisation and commercialisation in public education systems under the provocation of how the 'public' nature of schooling is changing. This is essential reading for those interested in the idea that current education policy reforms are reshaping what might be considered core educational practices in public schooling.

Over the last two decades, large-scale national, or provincial, standardised testing has become prominent in the schools of many countries around the globe. National Testing in Schools: An Australian Assessment draws on research to consider the nature of national testing and its multiple effects, including: media responses and constructions such as league tables of performance pressures within school systems and on schools effects on the work and identities of principals and teachers and impacts on the experience of schooling for many young people, including those least advantaged. Using Australia as the case site for global concerns regarding national testing, this book will be an invaluable companion for education researchers, teacher educators, teacher education students and teachers globally.

Over the last two decades, large-scale national, or provincial, standardised testing has become prominent in the schools of many countries around the globe. National Testing in Schools: An Australian Assessment draws on research to consider the nature of national testing and its multiple effects, including: media responses and constructions such as league tables of performance pressures within school systems and on schools effects on the work and identities of principals and teachers and impacts on the experience of schooling for many young people, including those least advantaged. Using Australia as the case site for global concerns regarding national testing, this book will be an invaluable companion for education researchers, teacher educators, teacher education students and teachers globally.

This collection works with the philosophy of Gilles Deleuze, and his collaborator Felix Guattari, in the context of education. Deleuze once remarked that we get the philosophy we deserve because of the questions that we ask. Deleuze saw that the work of philosophy was the creation of concepts - those working with his theory are admonished not to follow but to think. For Deleuze, education remained a philosophical problem because it is connected to problems of language, authority, meaning and what it means to learn and think. With that in mind, these contributions were chosen because they apply this ethic to education to think again about what constitutes a problem. In this book, Deleuze's conceptual contributions such as affect, assemblage, the logic of sense and control society and modulation are put to work to consider various educational problems in educational settings. What brings these contributions together, apart from working with Deleuze, is that they present education as a problem requiring new concepts. Readers are invited into an encounter with Deleuze's thought because of the situations in which we find ourselves. The chapters in this book were originally published as journal articles by Taylor and Francis journals.

Suzanne Beauchesne, a wealthy French entrepreneur, sees a younger woman seated at the table of a pavement cafe, close to the Gare du Nord railway station in Paris. She is attracted by Vicky Morton's poise and apparent innocence. At the heart of Suzanne's desire is a wish to satisfy a craving for sadistic pleasure with a female companion. She sets out to groom the young English woman for this purpose. However, the unworldly Vicky also has secret and unusual yearnings. The two women fall in love and enjoy an idyllic summer in the French countryside, but their happiness cannot last. This is a tale of romantic adventure that explores how Vicky grows up and has difficulty coming to terms with her personality traits. It notes how she balances feelings of arousal and guilt with an increasing concern for the plight of abused and exploited women across the world. Vicky finds happiness, but then has to face dramatic challenges that endanger her life. . .

It's no secret that organized crime is everywhere. From Japan and Italy to Israel and Mexico, there seems to be no place on earth where an organized crime family doesn't exist. You may think that one of the few safe places left is friendly, welcoming Canada, which many believe is so safe that people there always leave their doors unlocked. Think again. This book delves into the often ignored but nevertheless bloody world of Canadian mobs. You'll meet the Rizzutos, a powerful family with connections to the legendary Five Families of the American Mafia. Then there's the Cotroni family formed by Vic "the Egg" Cotroni, an ex-wrestler with ties to the Ndrangheta. You'll also learn about their connections to the blood-soaked Quebec Biker War, where the Hell's Angels and the Rock Machine battled for 17 years and claimed 150 lives. And just wait until you get to Toronto Prepare to be shocked by the true story of organized crime in Canada. It proves that there is truth to the expression, "it's the quiet ones you have to watch."

He's sailed the seven seas and explored unknown lands, fought countless monsters and battled evil wizards, but Sinbad's newest adventure may be the greatest - and most dangerous - he's ever had! Eight years have passed since the assassination of the benevolent Zhar Dadgar and the curious disappearance of his heir. Akhdar, Dadgar's villainous nephew, has usurped the Dozhakian throne and enslaved the Azurian people, igniting a civil war within the once peaceful kingdom. A prophecy foretells the coming of the stranger from a distant land who will vanquish the false king and restore the rightful ruler to the throne. Could Sinbad be that stranger, or is he merely a pawn in Akhdar's treacherous game?

Connectedness is a complex idea that seems to mean different things for each individual. For the purposes of this dissertation, connectedness can best be understood as the ways that an individual feels an affiliation with the community of the institution that he/she experiences. This book seeks to uncover the discourses that various stakeholder groups have within the site of a single school concerning connectedness. One of the precepts that this dissertation holds is that connectedness to school has benefits for the individual as learner, the school as a community and potentially the wider community in years to come. This is a theoretical position in the lineage of such theorists as Plato, Rousseau, and Dewey who have argued that education is a transformative practice that could be a tool for solving some of the issues that contemporary societies face. This work uses the theories of Foucault to extend the analysis to argue that connectedness is not a monolithic constant, but rather a complex set of converging and diverging discourses that students must contend with.