Abstract This conceptual paper extends existing theorization of affective chronopolitics to examine how AI technologies become implicated in the governance of educational subjects, institutions and imagined futures in higher education. In particular, we argue that AI‐mediated temporalities may involve different manifestations such as immediacy, anticipation, acceleration or delay, while their affective dimensions may encompass anxiety and fatigue as well as relief and hope. Building on scholarship on chronopolitics, affect and educational governance, we develop a multi‐level analytical framework spanning the micro level of lived experience and subject formation, the meso level of institutional organization and responsibility and the macro level of policy imaginaries and governance. The framework foregrounds how AI technological capacities become translated into affective‐temporal norms and how their benefits and burdens are unevenly distributed in higher education. We suggest that this framework offers a heuristic for empirical research into how AI reorganizes affective and temporal arrangements in higher education.
Abstract This study investigates how parents in Türkiye justify their decision to enrol their children in private schools and negotiate this choice in relation to their awareness of educational inequality. While critical school choice scholarship, particularly research conducted in England, has examined the moral and affective tensions between being a good parent and a good citizen, this article considers how these tensions are negotiated in a different policy context. Drawing on qualitative interviews with 17 private school parents, analysed through reflexive thematic analysis and informed by a governmentality perspective on risk and responsibilisation, alongside affective–discursive practice, I examine how private schooling becomes a morally defensible choice in a context where state policies have supported private provision and educational competition is shaped by high‐stakes examinations. Participants described perceived academic, social and institutional risks associated with public schooling, while presenting private schools as offering security, responsiveness and socially compatible environments. In these accounts, private schooling could appear as a parental obligation rather than simply a preference. Although 15 participants acknowledged that private schooling deepens educational inequality, they differed in how they reconciled this recognition with their choices. Some legitimised their decisions through appeals to necessity, parental care or responsibility beyond the individual family, while five expressed sustained moral conflict. The findings suggest that moral legitimation can reconfigure, without necessarily eliminating, the moral tensions of school choice, as decisions experienced as necessary may simultaneously reproduce privilege and social boundaries.
Abstract School‐based relationships and sexuality education (RSE) is a site of intense discursive circulation around the concept of gender. In the 2020s, international RSE curricula are responding to increasing visibility and cognisance of gendered and sexual diversity among young people and attempting to address gender‐based inequities and violence. Simultaneously, expansive RSE curricula are also the targets of sustained assault from ‘anti‐gender’ movements, which assemble diverse phantomatic fears—including crises of masculinity, reduced religious influence, the corruption of notional childhood innocence and reduced parental influence over access to sexuality education—into furious attacks on LGBTQ+ rights, feminism and RSE itself. These moves are typically framed as protecting young people but paradoxically ignore their lived experiences and persistent calls for more comprehensive education around gender and sexuality. Grounded in this hopeful yet fulminous international context, this paper asks what else can be learned about gender's discursive circulations from young people's negotiations of school‐based RSE. The paper offers a rhizoanalytic orientation to gender, entangling imaginaries of gender discourses in RSE as a waveform, and gender fears as phantoms with data produced during a doctoral project exploring teachers' negotiations of a new statutory, rights‐based national RSE curriculum in Cymru/Wales. Within rhizoanalysis, assemblage theory is deployed to explore how gender became salient during one event within a participatory, arts‐based RSE ‘creative audit’ at a Welsh secondary school. An encounter between two Year Ten (aged 14–15) boys, a toy pistol, a Pride flag and a teacher is engaged multiply through written analysis and a series of assemblage maps to explore the ways in which gender—differentially constituted across theorised assemblages—emerges, informs and shapes situated talk and interactions. The paper considers the challenge and promise of engaging boys in rights‐based education, and the role of teachers in fostering inclusion, tackling homophobia and addressing gender‐based violence, within a shifting cultural milieu where these inequities are gaining traction across diverse political and educational contexts.
Abstract Teachers' responses to artificial intelligence (AI) are mostly studied through intention‐based acceptance models, where a binary contrast between users and non‐users leaves the differences inside each group out of view. Occupational variables, when considered, are typically examined one at a time. This study applied diffusion of innovations theory to move beyond the user/non‐user dichotomy towards empirically derived adoption profiles, and modelled occupational perceptions as an interconnected network instead of as separate variables. Data from the TALIS 2024 AI module were analysed for 54,276 teachers across 55 education systems. Latent class analysis of teachers' AI use, attitudes, and barriers identified five distinct profiles corresponding to the theory's adopter categories. A mixed graphical model estimated the unique association between profile membership and each of 12 occupational perceptions. Perceived societal value of the profession emerged as the strongest correlate (edge weight = 0.24), three to five times larger than any other; self‐efficacy played a secondary role. Perceived value tracked openness to AI rather than actual use, while indecision and principled rejection concentrated among those feeling undervalued. Value was highest among teachers who had internalised AI pedagogically, not merely used it instrumentally. Beyond self‐efficacy and well‐being, these findings position the perceived standing of the teaching profession as a central condition for AI adoption. Policies that address how the profession is valued may therefore be as consequential for integration as those targeting skills or infrastructure.
Abstract In England, schools receive additional annual funding in proportion to the number of disadvantaged students that they enrol. This Pupil Premium funding is allocated by schools to help overcome educational disadvantage. According to Department for Education regulations, schools must report the evidence underpinning their spending allocations, and publish these strategies online. This pilot study examines how 900 primary schools in England used research evidence to justify Pupil Premium spending decisions. Schools were randomly sampled across economic regions (100 per region), and strategy documents were collected from school websites using web scraping. Automated text analysis identified funded interventions and types of evidence cited, followed by rapid reviews to assess the evidence trustworthiness. Most schools (84%) used the Department for Education's recommended template. Of the 685 records that referenced branded interventions, only 10% cited specific institutional evidence, 63% made reference to generic Education Endowment Foundation guidance, and 26% provided no evidence. Even where ‘evidence’ was cited, it was too often inappropriately evidence of ineffectiveness, or merely a plan to evaluate the intervention. Even among the five most popular programmes, only two had supporting evidence, while three had limited or no evidence. The study demonstrates how automated analysis of publicly available school policy documents can be used to examine evidence use at scale in education systems. It also highlights that school published statements to justify funding are often broad, indirect, and not programme‐ or evidence‐specific. The paper recommends better presentation of evidence bases to help schools in this difficult area.
