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This chapter aims to contribute to research on standards and regulation in education, taking as a point of departure three sets of interrelated policies, core to the globalised educational agenda: policies on competencies and skills, school autonomy and performance-based accountability, representing a new governmental logic founded on the values of efficiency, quality, competitiveness and outcomes. The chapter has a double purpose: first, to make a theoretical contribution to the literature interrogating the new modes of governing schools and curricular knowledge. It does this, by explicating the relationship between the regulative dimension of global policy discourses, embodying the principle of performativity, and the discourses regulating pedagogic practices in local sites, where policies are enacted. Second, to present aspects of a study carried out in the Greek education context, in which policies towards a post-bureaucratic administration regime (school autonomy, national testing, accountability mechanisms) have failed to be institutionalised. Focusing on the Modern Greek Language curriculum and its enactments in demanding school settings, the study illustrates how discourses on inclusion, diffused within the educational field and invading the school space, exert strong control over teachers' instructional practices. It is argued that developments of Bernstein's theory of knowledge pedagogisation provide a language to describe the complex ways in which regulative discourses operate in global times, affecting the recontextualisations of curricular policies. The theory thus contributes to the literature on the enactments of globalised education policies and helps explain the diversity of national and institutional responses to such policies.

In this chapter, the authors aim to recontextualise the local picture of youth participation in Manchester in a wider European perspective. First, because the research framework was a comparative European research project and, second, because the relevance also of local research depends on the degree to which it provides general insight into a phenomenon. The authors share with the editors and the other authors of this book the aim of questioning dominant understandings that limit youth participation to institutionalised forms and to young people’s involvement in existing practices and processes predefined by others, in most cases adult professionals like educators, youth workers and policy-makers. Based on the identification and discussion of three aspects related to the recognition of young people’s practice as participation in formal, non-formal and informal settings, the current authors want to use their views from the outside to shed light on the tensions and ambivalences of youth participation that do not become obsolete by applying a wider notion of participation.

The importance of contextualizing theory development in entrepreneurship education has recently been raised. Nevertheless, efforts often lead to rather decontextualized concepts and generic theories that are unable to bring together the complexities of applying entrepreneurship education to particular institutional logics and local pedagogical understandings. Based on a narrow and selective literature review, this study aims to identify and reconstruct how entrepreneurship education can adjust to the disciplines in which it unfolds. To contribute to transcending this dilemma, this article raises the following question: How can entrepreneurship education be understood in a differentiated manner and contextually reconstructed to the many disciplines and professions in which it unfolds?

The study follows the general idea of an integrative literature review, meaning that a few references, in particular Jones' work on a signature pedagogy for entrepreneurship education, led to a deeper search of the older background literature from Shulman on the idea of a signature pedagogy for professions.

The authors identify three existing notions (MK-0, MK-1 and MK-2) of signature pedagogy within entrepreneurship education and propose a fourth notion that combines the established understandings into a signature pedagogy, MK-3, in which entrepreneurship education should be adjusted to the disciplines in which it unfolds, by integrating and balancing general, disciplinary/professional and entrepreneurial purposes of education.

Accepting that context matters to entrepreneurship education creates a need for understanding the contextual influence on pedagogies. The paper contributes by establishing a theory-based framework that can help educators formulate and balance general, professional and entrepreneurial purposes of education, depending on the particular context of their educational activities. Furthermore, the paper is a call to action for additional scholarship that identifies avenues for future research.

This chapter examines early childhood pedagogy in Germany. It developed in the wake of the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) education debate, and the expansion of higher education led to new types of application-oriented courses. For a long time, child day care in Germany was not seen as a subject of theoretical worth. Vocational training for kindergarten teachers, overwhelmingly employed in day care centers, has not yet been academized. The academic study of childhood pedagogy is a thereof separate project, taught especially at universities of applied science. Nevertheless, constructions of new disciplines are directed toward professional fields, for which they claim relevance with their academic training. With its focus on “Bildung” childhood pedagogy in Germany claims to offer a scientifically based solution to the practical problems of action in child day care. This chapter discusses the specific content of the curricula statistical figures of graduates at universities and in the fields of practice. It provides first empirical clarification on observable phenomena of a scientific “penetration” of cognitive rationality in kindergartens. It fosters an academic habitus that induces a distancing from direct interaction with children, leads to a diversification of tasks in day care centers, and promotes hierarchical processes of professional role differentiation in the field of childcare.

Assessments are a technical key element of new governance strategies. The implementation of output steering methods into the German education system is accompanied by an attempt to substitute approved semantics by implementing an external re-description of educational processes. As education cannot rely on causal technology, terms such as market, competition, entrepreneurship, and commodification render the organizations of the education system into a paradoxical situation. Their typical practice of loose coupling is frustrated by accountability and responsibility claims. The new order to “tightly couple” is accompanied by the call for technical solutions and management competencies of the staff. What happens when organizations have to cope with expectations they cannot meet? This chapter discusses the question of how the semantic shift from the term professional to classroom manager profoundly affects the essence of established pedagogical thinking and acting.

This chapter focuses on the Street Work Homeless Project that was the site of one of the ethnographic case studies conducted in Manchester and also one of the participatory action research projects. The participants – men with lived experience of homelessness – were in many ways the antithesis of those usually considered for inclusion in a study on youth participation. However, the chapter shows how there is much to learn from this project, particularly in terms of how marginalised groups can actively participate in and for society. In preparation for the chapter, Rowley and Charles revisited their reflections and learning from the project. From this process, they wrote conversations exploring tensions that ran throughout the project. These tensions, and an antidote, are explored in the chapter. The chapter emphasises the importance of relationality in building mutuality and trust, the limitations of empowerment due to internalising pathologising dominant narratives, and the need to witness rather than spectate the more discomforting aspects of learning participation. By working through these tensions, it was possible to shift relations and roles between those designated as facilitator and participant leading to the question ‘who was lost and who was found?’. The chapter concludes that such processes are necessarily agonistic and creative to enable more inclusive and democratic participation to occur for marginalised groups.

The purpose of this article is to assess the state of affairs of intercultural bilingual education (IBE) policies in Argentina. IBE encompasses educational proposals designed to address the specific needs of ethnolinguistic minorities.

The article is divided into three parts and methodologically analyzes different types of materials (national legislation, bibliography and personal research experiences).

In the first section, the educational policies on cultural and linguistic diversity are contextualized historically. Later, IBE is defined considering five main characteristics (the neoliberal compensatory education policy, educational decentralization/regionalization, the educational category of the system, linguistic goals and teacher profiles). Finally, the conclusions list the challenges, goals that have yet to be achieved and the future perspectives of this educational policy.

This article contributes to the field of studies on diversity in the schooling of ethnically different groups.