Situated at the intersection between social work and education, social pedagogy is an original and dynamic academic and professional tradition. It can be found across most European countries and shows great variety, being closely connected to specific national - and sometimes even regional cultures and structures. Yet despite this diversity, social pedagogy also has many common features, cross-nationally. The aim of the book is to illustrate this diversity via a selection of case studies from Denmark, France, Germany, Poland and Sweden. Although social pedagogy is, in many countries, a profession that represents a sizeable workforce, very little has been written about it from a European perspective. Comparative literature tends to look at social work, whereby social pedagogy is obscured. But while there is a lack of comparative social pedagogy literature, interest in social pedagogy is growing. This is particularly so in the United Kingdom where no social pedagogy tradition exists but policy developments point to the emergence of a social pedagogy paradigm both in academia and in terms of careers. This book aims to help fill the gap. Case studies deal with theoretical and practical aspects of social pedagogy, professional education, fields of practice and research as well as links with other academic and professional paradigms.

The ambition of this two-volume publication is to illustrate the applicability of social pedagogy - as an academic and professional paradigm - to work with the most diverse target populations. It is launched at a moment when important and highly interesting developments can be observed in the United Kingdom: a country without a traditional social pedagogy model has started importing social pedagogy from countries with a social pedagogy tradition. Social Pedagogy for the Entire Lifespan illustrates how social pedagogy - as a model in theory and practice - has been and is currently being used, around and across Europe, for work with people of all age groups. Volume I is dedicated to the theory and history of social pedagogy, as well as to practice with children and young people. Chapters cover Belgium, Denmark, France, Germany, Norway and Spain. Volume II will include chapters on practice with adults and seniors, as well as chapters on further perspectives.

Explores debates around learner-centred education (or child-centred education) as a strategy for developing teachers' classroom practice and asks whether a 'Western' construct is appropriate for application in all societies and classrooms.

This book brings the key ideas and concepts of social realism to bear on current debates in the fields of knowledge and curriculum. The key concern of this collection is to highlight matters related to knowledge and the influence these dimensions have on the formation of curricula, pedagogy, identity, and equity in educational contexts. Presenting new perspectives on the place of various types and forms of knowledge in contemporary education, this book explores two central questions, ‘what type of knowledge is most important to include in a curriculum?’ and ‘what is meant by disciplinary knowledge?’ The chapters use empirical examples to illustrate how the issues play out on a global stage, interweaving the social justice concern of equitable access to disciplinary knowledge throughout. In particular, the authors address the emerging theorisation of issues related to the decolonisation of curricula, the recontextualisation of ‘non-traditional’ knowledge into the curriculum, and teacher education. Offering new philosophical and theoretical perspectives, this book will be of interest to researchers, scholars, and students examining the fields of knowledge and curriculum, and the sociology of education more broadly.

In Knowledge, Curriculum, and Preparation for Work, the editors offer a timely collection of chapters approaching debates on economic and social change and employment within different types of economies. Considering questions of knowledge and curriculum, these works interrogate ways of thinking about relationships between different forms of work and education. The focus is both on the curriculum – the ways in which different types of knowledge affect the quality and organization of curricula that are intended to prepare for work – and the factors influencing and constraining what education can do to prepare for work, as well as how these factors shape and limit the role of educational preparation for work.

In 2008 the first in a series of symposia established a ‘social realist’ case for ‘knowledge’ as an alternative to the relativist tendencies of the constructivist, post-structuralist and postmodernist approaches dominant in the sociology of education. The second symposium focused on curriculum, and the development of a theoretical language grounded in social realism to talk about issues of knowledge and curriculum. Finally, the third symposium brought together researchers in a broad range of contexts to build on these ideas and arguments and, with a concerted empirical focus, bring these social realist ideas and arguments into conversation with data. Knowledge, Curriculum and Equity: Social Realist Perspectives contains the work of the third symposium, where the strengths and gaps in the social realist approach are identified and where there is critical recognition of the need to incrementally extend the theories through empirical study. Fundamentally, the problem that social realism is seeking to address is about understanding the social conditions of knowledge production and exchange as well as its structuring in the curriculum and in pedagogy. The central concern is with the on-going social reproduction of inequality through schooling, and exploring whether and how foregrounding specialised knowledge and its access holds the possibility for interrupting it. This book consists of 13 chapters by different authors working in Oceania, Asia, Europe, Africa and North America. From very different vantage points the authors focus their theoretical and empirical sights on the assumptions about knowledge that underpin educational processes and the pursuit of more equitable schooling for all.

In this book international geography educators discuss the ways in which geographical knowledge is recontextualised in schools and consider effective approaches to facilitate, improve and advance geography education in research and practice. It addresses key topics in recontextualising geography such as the epistemic relationships between the university discipline and the school subject, designing and evaluating the geography curriculum, the role of students in the transformation of knowledge in the classroom and selecting and transforming geographical content knowledge for the primary school curriculum. At an international level, the contributors and editors bring together an advanced collection of research and discussion surrounding the opportunities and challenges of recontextualising geography in education. The book is of interest to geography educators internationally, including academics at universities, teachers in schools, and professional geographers with an interest in education.

This volume, the fifth in the series developing Bernstein's code theory, presents a clear account of the developments of this code theory and shows the close relation between its development and the empirical research to which the theory has given rise.