By repositioning democratic education not as something that can be achieved by following a certain, proven process, but as an inherently paradoxical enterprise in its dealings with the tension between schooling as the intentional production of citizens and the uncertainties of democracy, an alternative way of reading the curriculum emerges. This book aims not at arriving at the right combination of theory, policy and praxis that will provide the democratic utopia, but at historicizing the discourses that have shaped the ways in which we think and act in the field of education.

With a focus on the role of discourse and language in education, this book examines China's educational reform from an original perspective that avoids mapping on Westernized educational sensibilities to a Chinese environment. Zhao untangles the tradition-modernity division expressed in China's educational language about the body and teacher-student relations. Exploring the historical and cultural implications of the ways China's schooling is talked about and acted upon, Zhao argues that Chinese notion "wind" (feng) is a defining aspect of Chinese teaching and learning. Incorporating...

German education plays a huge role in the development of education sciences and modern universities internationally. It is influenced by the educational concept of Bildung, which defines Germany 's theoretical and curricular ventures. This concept is famously untranslatable into other languages and is often misinterpreted as education, instruction, training, upbringing and other terms which don't encompass its cultural ambitions. Despite this hurdle, Bildung is now being recognized in current discussions of education issues such as standardization, teaching to the test,...

Challenging conventional ways of thinking about school reforms and teacher education, this book analyses how the "knowledge systems" which organize how teachers' observe, supervise, and evaluate children produces norms that have the effect of excluding children who are poor and of color. Building on Struggling for the Soul (1998), his original study of the day-to-day life of new teachers in the Teach for America program, Popkewitz delves deeper into how the teaching and learning practices of urban and rural schools. Applying an ethnographic focus to how difference and divisions are...