This book invites readers to engage with the rich and complex debates of contemporary English education, outlining new possibilities to revive the teaching of English. Bringing together diverse voices and insights from educators in English across the primary, secondary, further and higher education phases, the book offers reflections and critical engagement with the lived experiences of English teachers and pupils in contemporary educational spaces. Each chapter includes example vignettes from classrooms which tell something of the story of English teaching today. The book considers how politics and policy have worked to close the opportunities of the English classroom for self-expression and critical engagement with the world – a murder. The authors then offer an exploration of the opportunities for a re-imagining of English – the murmurs of teachers and pupils that resist such closures. The chapters explore new thinking, new practices and new possibilities for English classrooms as inclusive, emancipatory, critical and creative spaces. Offering a thoughtful and hopeful dialogue from practising English teacher-researchers, the book will be essential reading for researchers and students of English language and literature education, as well as trainee teachers of English.

Based on the Transforming Lives research project, this book explores the transformative power of further education. The book outlines a timely and critical approach to educational research and practice, and draws extensively on the testimonies of students and teachers to construct a model of transformative teaching and learning. It critiques reductive ‘skills’ policies in further education and illuminates the impact colleges and lifelong learning have on social justice outcomes for individuals, their families and communities. For trainee teachers, teachers, leaders, researchers and policy makers alike, the book presents a persuasive argument for transformative approaches to teaching and learning, and highlights the often unmeasured and under-appreciated holistic social benefits of further education.

Les Lieux de memoire is perhaps one of the most profound historical documents on the history and culture of the French nation. Assembled by Pierre Nora during the Mitterand years, this multivolume series has been hailed as "a magnificent achievement" (The New Republic) and "the grandest, most ambitious effort to dissect, interpret and celebrate the French fascination with their own past" (The Los Angeles Times). Written during a time when French national identity was undergoing a pivotal change and the nation was struggling to define itself, this unprecedented series consists of essays by prominent historians and cultural commentators which take, as their points of departure, a lieu de memoire: a site of memory used to order, concentrate, and secure notions of France's past. The first volume in the Chicago translation, Rethinking France, brings together works addressing the omnipresent role of the state in French life. As in the other volumes, the lieux de memoire serve as entries into the French past, whether they are actual sites, political traditions, rituals, or even national pastimes and textbooks. Volume I: The State offers a sophisticated and engaging view of the French and their past through widely diverse essays on, for example, the château of Versailles and the French history of absolutism; the Code civil and its ordering of French life; memoirs written by French statesmen; and Charlemagne and his place in French history. Nora's authors constitute a who's who of French academia, yet they wear their erudition lightly. Taken as a whole, this extraordinary series documents how the French have come to see themselves and why. Contributors: Alain Guery, Maurice Agulhon, Bernard Guenee, Daniel Nordman. Robert Morrissey, Alain Boureau, Anne-Marie Lecoq, Helene Himelfarb, Jean Carbonnier, Herve Le Bras, Pierre Nora.--Publisher description.

Rethinking Music reflects the ideas of 24 distinguished musicologists as they evaluate current thinking about music, its social and ethical dimensions and the relationship between academic study and direct musical experience.

"This book sheds new light on the unfolding of Reformation in England by examining the ideological development of Catholicism in the formative years between the break with Rome and the consolidation of Elizabethan Protestantism. It argues that the undoubted strength of Catholicism in these years may have come less from its traditionalism, and its resistance to change, than from its ability to embrace reforming principles. The humanist elements within Henry VIII's religious policies encouraged the development of the Erasmian potential already well established in English Catholic thought. A dominant strain of Catholic ideology emerged which attempted not only to defend, but also to reform the Catholic faith, and to promote the study of Scripture, the use of the vernacular, and the refashioning of doctrine. This provided the basis for attempts to launch a Catholic Reformation under Mary I, and remained influential during the early years of Elizabeth, until reconfigured by the experience of exile and the drive for Counter-Reformation uniformity." "Dr. Wooding shows that Catholicism in this period was neither a defunct tradition, nor one merely reacting to Protestantism, but a vigorous intellectual movement responding to the reformist impulse of the age. Its development illustrates the English Reformation in microcosm: scholarly, humanist, practical, and preserving its own peculiarities distinct from European trends. It shows that reform was not a Protestant reserve, but a broad concern in which many participated. Rethinking Catholicism in Reformation England makes an important contribution to the intellectual history of the Reformation."--BOOK JACKET.

The Highland bagpipe, widely considered 'Scotland's national instrument', is one of the most recognized icons of traditional music in the world. It is also among the least understood. But Scottish bagpipe music and tradition - particularly, but not exclusively, the Highland bagpipe - has enjoyed an unprecedented surge in public visibility and scholarly attention since the 1990s. A greater interest in the emic led to a diverse picture of the meaning and musical iconicism of the bagpipe in communities in Scotland and throughout the Scottish diaspora. This interest has led to the consideration of both the globalization of Highland piping and piping as rooted in local culture. It has given rise to a reappraisal of sources which have hitherto formed the backbone of long-standing historical and performative assumptions. And revivalist research which reassesses Highland piping's cultural position relative to other Scottish piping traditions, such as that of the Lowlands and Borders, today effectively challenges the notion of the Highland bagpipe as Scotland's 'national' instrument. The Highland Bagpipe provides an unprecedented insight into the current state of Scottish piping studies. The contributors – from Scotland, England, Canada and the United States – discuss the bagpipe in oral and written history, anthropology, ethnography, musicology, material culture and modal aesthetics. The book will appeal to ethnomusicologists, anthropologists, as well as those interested in international bagpipe studies and traditions.

Explicitly linking curriculum inquiry to English education via recurring themes of representation, democracy and knowledge, this book is a call for both researchers and practitioners to engage with curriculum, explicitly and deliberatively, as both a concept and a question. The approach is broadly conceptual and constitutes an exercise in theoretical and philosophical inquiry. While deeply informed by North American debates and developments, this book offers a distinctive counterpoint and a strategically ‘ex-centric’ perspective, being equally informed by the curriculum scene in Australia, as well as the UK and elsewhere. Divided into two sections, this book first addresses matters of general curriculum inquiry, while the second turns more specifically to English teaching and to associated questions of language, literacy and literature in L1 education. Green brings the two together through a critical examination of the Australian national curriculum, especially in its implications and challenges for English teaching, and with due regard for the project of transnational curriculum inquiry.

Familiar and expected gender patterns help us to understand boys but often constrict our understanding of any given boy. Writing in a wonderfully robust and engaging voice, Ken Corbett argues for a new psychology of masculinity, one that is not strictly dependent on normative expectation. As he writes in his introduction, “no two boys, no two boyhoods are the same.” In Boy Hoods Corbett seeks to release boys from the grip of expectation as Mary Pipher did for girls in Reviving Ophelia. Corbett grounds his understanding of masculinity in his clinical practice and in a dynamic reading of feminist and queer theories. New social ideals are being articulated. New possibilities for recognition are in play. How is a boy made between the body, the family, and the culture? Does a boy grow by identifying with his father, or by separating from his mother? Can we continue to presume that masculinity is made at home? Corbett uses case studies to defy stereotypes, depicting masculinity as various and complex. He examines the roles that parental and cultural anxiety play in development, and he argues for a more nuanced approach to cross-gendered fantasy and experience, one that does not mistake social consensus for well-being. Corbett challenges us at last to a fresh consideration of gender, with profound implications for understanding all boys.

Public universities are in crisis, waning in their role as central institutions within democratic societies. Denunciations are abundant, but analyses of the causes and proposals to re-create public universities are not. Based on extensive experience with Action Research-based organizational change in universities and private sector organizations, Levin and Greenwood analyze the wreckage created by neoliberal academic administrators and policymakers. The authors argue that public universities must be democratically organized to perform their educational and societal functions. The book closes by laying out Action Research processes that can transform public universities back into institutions that promote academic freedom, integrity, and democracy.

A group of Britain's most prestigious historians assemble to explore the formation of the UK, its history and its identity. Traditional regional and chronological frontiers are broken down as mediev- alists, modernists and early modernists debate.