Societal processes such as increasing globalization, diversity, and technological and digital developments pose significant challenges for schools and classroom teaching. Research-Practice-Partnerships (RPPs) aim to tackle the difficulties faced by teachers, schools, and students in their daily practices and may offer a collaborative approach to addressing these challenges. Using data from a systematic literature review, we examine whether RPPs address effective technology integration, teaching strategies for 21st century skills, migration and mobility, promotion of well-being, and equity and inclusion. Combined, these issues are defined as 21st century challenges by the OECD. Moreover, we examine whether fundamental traits of RPPs (geographical location, collaboration duration, stakeholders involved) are related to the issues they address. Thus, the challenges and the traits named above served as data coding categories. Content analysis of 126 research papers reveals that 21st century challenges form a real demand in schools and for teachers and that RPPs can be a solid means to address these challenges. Key among these challenges are the effective teaching of 21st century skills and promoting equity and inclusion. Additionally, our results expose disparities in the distribution, thematic focus, and organizational approaches of RPPs across different educational contexts. These insights deepen our understanding of RPPs.
This article analyzes how retrospective memories of primary schooling are structured across generations educated during and after Francoism and the democratic transition. Its objective is to identify patterns of memory about schooling and to explore their distribution across generational cohorts. Based on a retrospective questionnaire administered to adults born between 1942 and 1993 ( N = 295), the study uses latent profile analysis to identify configurations of school memory across dimensions related to school practices: teaching methods, curricular content, school organization, environment, innovation, and disciplinary practices. The analysis identifies two distinct profiles of remembered school experience. The first is characterized by a greater presence of traditional, punitive, and moral-religious practices, whereas the second presents higher levels of participatory practices and a more open school climate. The generational distribution of these profiles shows differences across cohorts, suggesting the coexistence of elements of continuity and change in remembered school experiences. The findings challenge homogeneous representations of schooling in these periods as remembered by those who experienced them and highlight their heterogeneous, situated, and reconstructed nature. These results should not be interpreted as direct evidence of the historical functioning of the educational system, but rather as retrospectively constructed patterns of memory regarding school experience, distributed across generational cohorts. By examining Spain as a historically specific European case, the study contributes to broader European research on educational memory and the legacies and transformations of schooling across authoritarian and post-authoritarian contexts.
Innovation has become a widely used term in educational policy and practice over the past two decades, frequently invoked as a solution to various educational challenges. However, the concept lacks a clear definition, resulting in ambiguous interpretations and varied applications. This scoping review examines the academic discourse surrounding educational innovation by reviewing 75 studies published between 2000 and 2024 focused on compulsory schooling. The study contributes by clarifying the uses of innovation in education through the identification of six narratives, grouped under two discourses: (1) innovation as adaptation—characterized by narratives of adjusting to education systems’ external needs, diversifying schools, employing rhetoric to construct pedagogical imaginaries based on economic paradigms and on change valued as an inherent good; and (2) innovation as transformation—comprising innovation as a means to foster shared learning experiences between teachers and students, and innovation as a driver for a justice-based transformation of society. A closer examination of these narratives reveals a fundamental tension between reproduction and transformation in education systems within educational innovation discourses, and findings indicate that despite the rhetoric of change and the promise of transformative outcomes, dominant innovation discourses frequently tilt the balance in favor of reproduction.
This article analyses the processes through which educational inequalities among primary-school children in Czechia widened during the COVID-19 pandemic, focussing on mothers' experiences of supporting their children ' s remote learning in the context of the digital acceleration. The study draws on a secondary analysis of qualitative interviews with 36 Czech mothers with different family and socio-economic status and education levels. It compares how mothers with different volumes of resources responded to the sudden transfer of educational responsibility from schools to households. The findings identify three key processes. First, socio-economic disadvantage translated into shortages of both digital and emotional capital, generating a self-reinforcing cycle of stress constraining parents' ability to support children's learning. Second, while all participants initially accepted responsibility and engaged in practices sustaining remote schooling, mothers with limited resources more often resorted to tacit resistance, whereas those with greater capital negotiated with schools or introduced innovations that improved learning conditions. Third, emotional capital proved central in shaping families' capacity to make effective use of digital resources. The article demonstrates how the interaction of economic, cultural, digital, and emotional capital reproduced educational inequalities during school closures, while also highlighting the practices through which mothers attempted to mitigate or challenge these dynamics.
This study examines whether changing educational tracks at the transition to upper secondary school affects the development of political interest among German adolescents. Using 5 years of panel data from the National Educational Panel Study (NEPS; N = 1578), we distinguish between academic tracks leading to higher education entrance qualifications and non-academic tracks leading to vocational qualifications. Linear panel models show that students in academic tracks display higher political interest and more favorable trajectories than those in non-academic tracks. However, these differences are fully explained by entry selection factors, especially prior political interest, cognitive competences, and social background, measured before the transition. Track changes, whether upward or downward, have no significant effect during upper secondary education. A small increase in political interest is observed among upward movers only after leaving school. This indicates education may influence political interest via status. The findings challenge earlier research suggesting direct track effects and compensatory benefits for less privileged students. Results underscore the importance of political socialization during lower secondary education and raise concerns about the ability of stratified school systems to provide equal opportunities for political learning, with implications for democratic resilience.
This article explores how administrative tradition mediates the enactment of gender equality policies within higher education institutions. Drawing on policy enactment theory and historical institutionalism, it analyses how institutional dynamics shaped by the Napoleonic administrative tradition influence the translation of policy mandates into practice in the context of Catalonia. The study employs qualitative data from semi-structured interviews with university actors, a content analysis of course syllabi, and an examination of institutional policy documents. The findings reveal that policy enactment is shaped by bureaucratic processes that prioritize formal compliance over substantive engagement, resulting in what we term the “bureaucratization of the gender perspective.” This phenomenon manifests in three key ways: the rigid formulation of institutional guidelines, the tokenistic inclusion of gender-related elements in course documentation, and the persistent gap between formal mandates and classroom practices. The study concludes that while formal frameworks can legitimize feminist efforts within universities, they also risk reducing gender equality to a superficial exercise in regulatory compliance. These findings contribute to ongoing debates about the limits of institutional reforms in fostering substantive cultural and pedagogical change, particularly in contexts where governance is marked by procedural uniformity and legal formalism.
This study examines the well-being and support needs of migrant students in Polish schools from the perspective of teachers. The analysis focuses on three domains of student well-being: emotional well-being, social integration, and educational participation. Data were collected through an online survey of N = 712 teachers in public schools in three major Polish cities with the highest migrant populations. The majority of respondents were female (82.4%). The survey explored teachers' perceptions of students' needs and support measures. Findings indicate that migrant students' emotional needs - particularly the need to feel safe, accepted, and belong - are perceived as fundamental to learning and integration. However, existing support measures only partially address these needs. Teachers identified gaps in culturally responsive support, including limited access to intercultural assistants, insufficient opportunities for instruction in students' first languages, and challenges related to Polish language development. Results also suggest that school support systems prioritize remedial or deficit-oriented interventions rather than strength-based approaches recognizing students' cultural and linguistic resources. Overall, the study reveals a mismatch between the formal availability of support services and the forms of assistance actually accessed by migrant students, highlighting the need for more targeted, culturally responsive, and integrated support strategies in Polish schools.
This article examines, from a comparative subject didactic perspective, the use of digital platforms in Swedish upper secondary schools, focusing on the significance in three school subjects: Swedish, mathematics, and history. Based on video recordings from 47 lessons, the analysis compares recontextualization of subject knowledge across the three subjects. Departing from Bernstein’s concepts of the pedagogic device and horizontal versus vertical knowledge structures, the analysis focus on how dimensions of textualization and templatization play out differently in the three subjects. The analysis reveals that the learning platforms become integrated into the established subject practices of Swedish, mathematics and history respectively and is thereby shaped by the different subject traditions. At the same time, the platform structure in itself also influences how knowledge can become organized, accessed, and presented. Findings point at similarities and differences in relation to planning and expectations of school performance, classroom interaction, text practices, and the broader digital context in relation to the learning platform. The results emphasize the importance of teacher agency in platform-based subject teaching, where platforms seem to push toward increased individualization of school work that might constrain deeper explanations and support for students’ critical thinking.
This special issue advances intersectional research in education in three key ways. First, it explicitly repositions intersectionality as a theoretical and epistemological intervention, grounded in Black feminist scholarship, rather than as a neutral methodological tool or policy metaphor. Second, it demonstrates how intersectionality can be enacted empirically across diverse European educational contexts, addressing persistent challenges related to data, methodology, and political resistance while retaining conceptual rigour. Third, the contributions move beyond descriptive accounts of inequality to foreground how intersecting structures of gender, race, class, sexuality, disability, and institutional power shape educational experiences, knowledge production, and professional trajectories. Collectively, the papers show what becomes possible when intersectionality is treated not as an add on, but as a critical lens that reshapes research questions, analytic frameworks, and interpretations. In doing so, the special issue offers concrete conceptual, methodological, and practical insights that extend existing intersectional scholarship in education and clarify its continued relevance for contemporary research and practice.
Every year, thousands of young people in Europe leave education prematurely, with significant individual, social and economic consequences. Despite recent improvements in overall rates of early school leaving in Europe, substantial disparities remain within and across countries, with children living in poverty, those with migrant backgrounds, and those from Roma or Traveller communities facing additional barriers to education. Following a multiple case study methodology this paper identifies learning environments that successfully reduce underachievement and early school leaving, and analyses the common elements that underpin their effectiveness. Observations, semi-structured interviews, and focus groups were conducted in 20 settings across 11 European countries involving around 800 participants, including students aged 6-15 years, school staff, families, and community stakeholders. The analysis reveals six key dimensions: engaging and inclusive classroom practices; positive staff-student relationships; positive peer relationships; supportive leadership; availability of guidance and counselling, especially for students at risk of marginalisation; and a holistic approach prioritising community involvement. These findings are discussed in relation to social capital theory and broader perspectives on educational inequality and institutional conditions, with implications for educators, policymakers, and school leaders seeking to address underachievement and promote equitable learning environments.
Over recent decades, the governance of schooling has relied less on deviance and sanction, while inclusion, diversity, and personalization have gained institutional prominence. This article argues that such a shift has not weakened selection but has reconfigured its mechanisms. It introduces the notion of blameless responsibility to capture a mode of governance based on selective anticipation, through which expected capacities, presumed vulnerabilities, and projected trajectories are assessed in advance. Responsibility concerns less what students have done than what they might not be able to sustain. Assessment, guidance, and inclusion policies may thus produce formally included subjects who remain exposed to shifting thresholds of adequacy. Responsibility is also distributed: teachers and school staff are required to make and justify selective decisions without an imputable act and without an explicit sanctioning boundary. The concept makes analytically visible forms of selection in which deviance no longer functions as the dominant regulatory grammar, and decisions remain difficult to attribute.
Educational aspirations and expectations are important indicators of individuals' educational and occupational trajectories. While existing research highlights the role of social background and migration-related factors, less is known about how these processes operate among refugees and the extent to which refugee-specific conditions matter. This study contributes to closing these gaps by drawing on data from the ReGES study (N = 2300), which surveyed refugee adolescents who arrived in Germany between 2014 and 2018. The findings showed that a substantial share of refugee adolescents reported high, academic aspirations and expectations. Several refugee-specific conditions, particularly insecure residence status, limited German language proficiency, attendance in newcomer classes and age-inappropriate school placement, were negatively associated with both outcomes, whereas risk of posttraumatic stress disorder showed no significant association. Contrary to theoretical expectations, these factors were not consistently more strongly related to educational expectations than to aspirations. Most associations were attenuated once parental educational aspirations, pre-migration social status, and migration-related mechanisms were considered. Parental aspirations emerged as the strongest positive predictor. Overall, the study highlights the importance of refugee-specific conditions within a broader framework of social inequality and migration research and discusses their implications for educational practice and future research.
The implementation of equality policies in primary and secondary schools often follows a single-issue logic, addressing gender, sexuality, or cultural diversity in isolation. This article examines the tensions that emerge when LGBTIQ equality policies are implemented in culturally diverse educational settings in Catalonia (Spain). Drawing on 24 interviews with public officers and civil society professionals and a group discussion with 14 practitioners, the study identifies 4 recurrent sites of tension: conceptual approaches to inequality, perspectives on cultural diversity, the positionality of professionals, and strategies of interpellation in classroom settings. Findings show that while intersectionality is increasingly referenced in policy frameworks, its translation into practice remains challenging. Classroom encounters reveal how religion, race, migration, class, gender, and sexuality interlock to shape both interventions and student responses. The article argues that intersectionality must be operationalised as a way to analyse power in policy and interventions, and calls for integrated, hybrid approaches to preserve its transformative potential in culturally diverse schools.
The paper scrutinises the transformation of the space-times of education, work, and the home, the seeming naturalness of which was seriously disrupted by the pandemic. In contrast to studies focussed on spatial forces that operate through the system or policy, our empirical observation focuses on the everyday spatial and temporal practices of people deprived of seemingly stable policies, administrative timetables, and maps. We contest prevailing arguments about blurred boundaries of the home and suggest an argument that draws on a topological approach to address the limits of the theory of interpenetration between school and society. The article analyses the repeated in-depth interviews with teachers who were mothers of children under 10 years of age and experienced the overlap of the teaching, working, and parenting roles during the pandemic. The analysis shows that the boundaries of the home were not blurred but discarded, and the home became a topological site of experimentation operating simultaneously through expansion and narrowing, bringing about radically open time-space which is made of evolving and coeval plural trajectories that are no longer more or less shared by the whole society, but there is an individual coordination according to milestones important for a particular family or school.
This paper explores how expatriate academics (EAs) embed in host universities through links, fit, and sacrifice. Based on interviews with 50 foreign scholars from 21 countries at 16 Polish universities, the study finds that EAs wish to stay despite incomplete embeddedness. They stay due to strong ties with foreign and local communities and benefits like stable jobs, safety, quality of life, recognition, and career prospects. However, they face challenges with organizational fit due to systemic support gaps and communication issues. The paper advances embeddedness theory by exploring the underexamined context of academic expatriation, examining EAs' networks, adaptation, and perceived sacrifices, offering insights for academic leaders and policymakers to improve support and retention. It also lays groundwork for comparative and future research on academic expatriation management in various national contexts.
The underrepresentation of women in leadership positions within higher education institutions is well-documented worldwide. However, limited evidence exists on the historical roots of this disparity, particularly regarding university traditions and their impact on the masculine role of rectors. This study addresses this issue by reconstructing the historical accounts of rectors in Poland, as demonstrated in institutional histories, autobiographies, biographies, laudatory statements, and obituaries. These historical accounts influence the formal aspects of the rector's role, particularly their position within the university governance structure, while also shaping the institutionalised expectations of the individuals involved. Consequently, the embodiment of masculinity in the role of rector negatively impacts women's access to these positions.
Democratic student participation is widely endorsed as a pillar of civic education and inclusive schooling. However, its enactment remains complex and often contested in everyday pedagogical practice. This study investigates how teachers' concerns about democratic student-participation are internally structured and shaped by individual beliefs and contextual conditions. Drawing on a cross-sectional survey of Austrian teachers (n = 311), the study employs exploratory factor analysis and multiple regression modeling to identify key dimensions of concern and their predictors. Results reveal a three-dimensional structure of teacher concerns: Loss of Control and Structure, Low Student Engagement, and Organizational Overload. Contrary to the assumption that concerns reflect ideological resistance, findings suggest that they are significantly shaped by institutional and relational factors, such as socio-economic student background, teacher age, and the extent to which participatory practices are embedded in core teaching processes and formal structures. Notably, teachers' abstract beliefs about democracy, whether civic, institutional, or social justice-oriented, did not significantly predict concern levels. These results underscore the need to reconceptualize teacher concerns not as obstacles but as context-sensitive indicators of the institutional conditions under which democratic education can thrive. Implications for professional development and policy reform are discussed.
The use of genetic data has proliferated in social and behavioural genomics research, leading to proposals for genetically-informed social policy. In particular, in the domain of 'educational genomics', researchers using 'polygenic scores'-summary statistics used to calculate social outcomes from genetic data-have generated scientific knowledge claims about the potential to predict educational outcomes from biological samples. These polygenic scores have become the basis for proposed experimental interventions in education policy and practice. In this article analyzing a large corpus of scientific texts, we develop an original conceptualization of five techniques associated with the use of polygenic scores in education. We identify the underlying scientific base for claims of the policy-relevance of educational genomics, and develop a conceptual vocabulary explaining the implications and significance of polygenic scores in education. We conceive of polygenic scores as bio-social policy instruments that fuse biological knowledge to social policy objectives. Educational genomics represents an experiment in genomic social policy, amplifying policy commitments to rating, sorting, evaluating, stratifying, and valuing students in education through promissory claims of biological authority. Polygenic scores have thus become the basis for educational genomics to exert policy influence as a significant and controversial source of educational intervention and governance.
Across Europe many young people are turning to activism to express their socio-political desires. Using Bourdieu's theory of habitus, understood as a system of dispositions toward specific practices and a basis for certain modes of behaviour; this study examines young people's perceptions of activism in three European settings. Based on thematic analysis of 83 discussion groups conducted with secondary school students in Italy, Germany, and Poland, we seek to understand whether and in what ways activism is embedded within young people's habitus and how variations in national European contexts influence activist habitus among European youth. Our findings show how activism has become increasingly seen as a normalised and accessible practice embedded in youth daily life; and reframes youth activism as a lasting, embedded aspect of youth identity and behaviour rather than a temporary response to immediate crisis.
