This paper explores how international students engage in knowledge as a central domain of self-formation, shaped by both personal aspirations and structural conditions within higher education. While research on student mobility increasingly highlights agency and identity, fewer studies consider how students navigate knowledge systems and position themselves within academic and societal structures. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork in the UK, Denmark, and Germany, this study investigates how international students critically engage with disciplinary knowledge, negotiate institutional barriers, and assert themselves in processes of knowledge production. The analysis shows that engagement in knowledge is not merely an academic pursuit but a means of shaping personal and societal futures. However, access to, and recognition within, these knowledge systems remain uneven, reinforcing existing global hierarchies. By centring students' experiences, this paper contributes to debates on cognitive justice and the transformative potential of higher education in reimagining relations between self and society.
This article examines how four former brigadistas, who participated in the 1980 Nicaraguan National Literacy Crusade, retrospectively make sense of their participation in the Sandinista Revolution. Throughout their reflections, they confront la m & iacute;stica revolucionaria, the cultural framework that shaped their involvement during and after the Crusade and that gave rise to internal struggles that blended compliance and agency. Drawing from historical narrative inquiry, the findings show at least four internal struggles from which they make meaning: 1) becoming a revolutionary subject through compliance, 2) confronting political and methodological directives with the pedagogical realities of the countryside, 3) transitioning from commitment to disillusionment and 4) sustaining their agentic self beyond the revolution. These struggles became an enduring source of lifelong learning that shaped how individuals preserved ethical commitments to education and justice while distancing themselves from the Sandinista party's transition into an autocratic organisation.
Involvement in International Large-Scale Assessments (ILSAs) is prestigious and often competitive. National advances may be sought and gained through participation potentially enabling countries to meet their international relations aims. To substantiate this claim, we focus on the initial intentions of the Republic of Cyprus in the early 2010s to participate in Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA), by analysing the views of policymakers, academics, teachers' trade union representatives, and senior officials of the country's Ministry of Education or its advisory bodies. We suggest that the involvement of countries in ILSAs is connected with both the enhancement of their international prestige in the educational field, and the promotion of geopolitical utilities. In the case of the Republic of Cyprus, such involvement aligns with its intention to become a member country of the OECD, overcoming the veto exercised by the mainland Republic of Turkiye.
This article offers a critical comparative analysis of language-in-education policies and practices in two postcolonial countries (Ghana and Pakistan) and one non-colonial context (Nepal), examining how these policies sustain or challenge social (in)justice. Drawing on a comparative education policy framework and Nancy Fraser's multidimensional model of social justice - encompassing redistribution, recognition, and representation - we analyse multilingual and English language education policies across the three national contexts, attending to both historical legacies and contemporary political-economic forces. Despite formal commitments to mother-tongue-based multilingual education, our analysis reveals enduring tensions between symbolic policy goals and the material realities of implementation. Across contexts, structural and ideological barriers continue to reproduce inequalities of multilingualism. We argue that meaningful linguistic justice in education requires more than policy-level recognition of Indigenous and local languages; it necessitates deeper structural and ideological transformations that disrupt entrenched hierarchies privileging dominant languages, particularly English.
This study critically examines if the OECD Teaching Compass genuinely transcends what Gert Biesta critiques as 'learnification' or the systematic reorientation of educational discourse around learning that obscures crucial questions about educational content, purpose, and relationships. Through Critical Discourse Analysis combined with Biesta's educational - philosophical framework, this study analyzes the discursive structure of the Teaching Compass. Despite introducing concepts such as 'teacher agency,' 'co-agency,' and 'well-being,' the analysis reveals that instrumentalist logic centred on learning outcomes and efficiency fundamentally persists. Teachers remain positioned as facilitators for achieving predetermined goals, while students are framed as agents of competency development, systematically excluding educational unpredictability and the possibility of subjectification. The emphasis on predictable curriculum and evidence-based practice represents attempts to eliminate education's 'beautiful risk.' This study conceptualises these findings as 'sophisticated learnification' and argues that genuine educational transformation requires recovering world-centred educational perspectives and recognising the ethical dimensions of educational relationships.
A micro-politics lens has been adopted to explore the power, interests and conflicts of major stakeholders in policy enactment at school level in China. A diverse selection of policy agents in a Chinese public primary school was interviewed. These policy agents, along with the study of 50 school policies, revealed similar power struggles in Chinese schools to their western counterparts. Conflicts arose in implementing education policy in Chinese schools, although the reactions presented in a milder form. In addition, power has been unevenly distributed among policy agents, though all major stakeholders had access to decision-making in policy enactment. Two notable findings in the study include the prominent impact of bureaucratic control and the more passive policy agents giving up power to ensure a clear boundary of interests with others in the enactment process, which reveals unique Chinese characteristics, possibly attributed to a centralised educational system and a collective culture.
Regarded as a regional educational leader in the 1990s and earlier, in the last two decades Jordan has progressively been lagging behind its regional peers to such an extent that it now scores behind most Arab States participating in international student learning assessments. This article analyses public primary teachers' views on the reasons behind this decline. This analysis uses neo-ecological systems theory to break down the complexity of what is essentially a wicked policy problem, while treating culture as a cross-cutting influence that shapes expectations, relationships and responses across household, school and policy levels. The paper argues that system-wide factors at the household, school and national levels are the root cause of low learning outcomes among students, mediated in part by wider socio-cultural norms and attitudes, even while the relatively recent 'shocks' from the Syrian refugee crisis and the COVID-19 pandemic have steepened the gradient of learning decline.
