In 2015, the Trans, Gender Variant and Intersex Students in School Policy was introduced under a Labour government in Malta, contributing significantly to Malta being ranked first by ILGA Europe for LGBTIQ+ rights in 2016, a position it continues to hold. Drawing on a mixed-methods study comprising 25 semi-structured interviews with trans students, educators, parents of trans students, and school administrators, alongside a quantitative survey of educators, this paper examines how the policy is understood, engaged with, and enacted in schools, and analyses both the policy itself and educators' understanding of it. Findings indicate that most educators were either unaware or insufficiently aware of the policy, while none of the trans participants knew of its existence; parents were proportionally the most familiar. Despite this limited engagement (42% of educators had not read the policy), educators articulated strong critiques, arguing that the policy unnecessarily spotlights trans individuals, is overly theoretical and abstract, and should remain a matter of school-level discretion. Crucially, this paper explicitly argues that these findings are relevant both to educational policy in general and to the specific dynamics of trans-focused policy. The data point, on the one hand, to a broader pattern of educator disengagement from state educational policy, characterised by policy fatigue and scepticism towards government-mandated frameworks, and, on the other, to trans-specific misunderstandings and resistance shaped by a global context of heightened media scrutiny and political contestation around trans lives. Rather than treating these dynamics as mutually exclusive, the paper contends that they operate simultaneously. Through a critique of positivistic orientations and rigid separations of theory and practice, the paper advances a hopeful dialectical alternative grounded in a critical anticolonial framework that rethinks both policy engagement and educational responsibility.
Literature engaging with the issue of caste in Indian higher education can broadly be classified into three streams. While all streams ascribe caste as a systemic issue, the third and most recent stream lays much emphasis on an individuals' experience of caste discrimination. This has problematised the deep-rooted casteism within everyday functioning of Indian Higher Educational Institutions (HEIs). However, it implicitly assumes that caste as a systemic issue, translates directly into an individual's experience of caste, thereby overlooking the crucial mediating role of higher educational institutions at the meso-level. The scholarship on caste in Indian higher education cannot afford such omissions provided that caste affiliations lie at the very core of establishment and the functioning of HEIs. Drawing on the engagement of organisational studies with race, we contend that there exists a necessity for examining the caste affiliations of HEIs. Such studies would enable the disaggregation of the all-encompassing category of p'rivate' institutions by providing for an examination of the abilities of each caste to administer their own HEIs thereby adding yet another layer for the study of inequalities in Indian higher education with profound policy implications.
This article reinterprets Samuel Laycocks''Th'Shurat Weavers'Song' (1863) as a historically grounded instance of a rhetoric of exhaustion, in which bodily depletion is converted into aesthetic method and vernacular critique. Bringing together cultural materialism, Freirean critical literacy, labour poetics scholarship and language ideology theory, the analysis shows how dialectal density, rhythmic drag, patterned repetition and tonal hybridity formalise industrial fatigue under the conditions of the Lancashire Cotton Famine. A compact comparison with Ellen Johnston, Ernest Jones clarifies Laycocks' distinctive synthesis of testimonial immediacy, political address and dialectal realism. The article argues that dialect functions as epistemic voice, challenging standard language hierarchies and offering a historical model for linguistic justice in education. Policy implications follow for dialect affirming assessment, curriculum design informed by labour poetics and teacher education oriented to critical language awareness. Finally, the study gestures to Eco pedagogy, reading Laycocks'material focus on Surat cotton as an early trace of eco social entanglements between labour exhaustion and degraded ecologies. By recentring a working-class poet within nineteenth century literary culture, the article contributes a transferable analytic-exhaustion as method-that links Victorian labour poetics to current struggles over democratic pedagogy, collective agency and equitable curriculum formation.
This article introduces Biocentric Industrial Creative Writing (BICW), a worker-led critical pedagogy that integrates creative writing, ecological ethics, and working-class narratives to challenge extractivist, anthropocentric optimisation in industrial culture. Drawing on ecocriticism, posthumanist theory, and critical pedagogy, BICW reframes the workplace as a narrative ecosystem in which humans and more-than-human actors co-produce meaning, value, and agency. We report an exploratory mixed-methods study (N = 219) across Greek industrial contexts, combining Likert-scale items with open-ended prompts that encourage ecological identification and the biocentric reimagining of optimisation. Descriptive results show high support for embedding BICW within workplace sustainability agendas, perceived benefits for wellbeing and reflective work engagement, and willingness to accept minor productivity reductions for ecological gains. Qualitative responses frequently adopt non-human standpoints (e.g., rivers, algae, butterflies) and express scepticism toward corporate sustainability messaging, underscoring the value of worker-generated narratives. We argue that BICW can strengthen critical ecological literacy and democratic participation at work, linking labour empowerment with environmental justice and opening space for just, multispecies industrial futures.
This study examines how state education agencies (SEAs) make funding decisions to support schools identified for comprehensive support and improvement under section 1003a of the Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA). Despite the federal mandate that states reserve and strategically deploy Title I Part A funds for school improvement, little is known about the mechanisms through which SEAs translate that mandate into practice. Drawing on semi-structured interviews with ten SEA administrators across geographically and demographically diverse sates, supplemented by document analysis of publicly available policy materials from California and New York, this study investigates two research questions: how SEAs determine funding levels for school improvement, and what criteria they apply when reviewing district applications. Thematic analysis of the data revealed four interconnected findings: 1) SEAs rely predominantly on enrollment-based and flat base allocation formulas that are structurally indifferent to school level need; 2) several states lack coherent or documented funding processes altogether; 3) funding decisions in multiple states are anchored to historical practices-including prior-year carryover-rather than differentiated need assessments; and 4) application review processes, even when formally elaborate, function as compliance mechanisms rather than instruments for equity-intentional resource distribution. The findings carry implications for federal oversight of Section 1003a, state-level SEA capacity investment, and the redesign of application processes as instruments of needs-based, funding determination.
