Educational policy might productively be conceptualized with an ecology metaphor. Each policy, thus considered, exists within a complex system that reflects varied international, national, regional, and local dynamics. Using this metaphor provides policy analysts with a view of the regularities and irregularities of any policy, its process, its texts, its reception, and its degree of implementation. The characteristics of policy ecologies alert analysts to the possibilities of great transformation, for good or ill, and give them a way to conceptualize how such transformations occur. Perhaps most important, using an ecology metaphor suggests specific ways that progressive researchers might positively intervene in the policy process.

Although the majority of research in gender and education has rightly focused on girls, recent research in the United States and elsewhere has focused much more on the learning, social outcomes, and schooling experiences of boys. This “boy turn” has produced a large corpus of theoretically oriented and practice-oriented research alongside popular and rhetorical works and feminist and pro-feminist responses, each of which this article reviews. To answer why boys have become such a concern at this time, this article explores the origins and motivations of the boy turn, examines major critiques of the distress about boys, and suggests possible directions for debates and research.

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Comics have long been a focus of scholarly inquiry. In recent years, this interest has taken a methodological turn, with scholars integrating comics creation into the research process itself. In this article, the authors begin to define and document this emerging, interdisciplinary field of methodological practice. They lay out key affordances that comics offers researchers across the disciplines, arguing that certain characteristics—multimodality, blending of sequential and simultaneous communication, emphasis on creator voice—afford powerful tools for inquiry. The authors finish by offering some questions and challenges for the field as it matures.

Food and eating in schools have most often been thought of as utilitarian parts of the day, as distractions, and, for education researchers, as lacking incentives to study or even as objects of derision rather than serious concern. Yet there are good reasons why scholars of education should consider food and food practices.These include the confounding influences of school food's impact on health and on academics, its effects on teaching and administration, the role schools play in teaching about food, implications for the environment and for other species, the large sums of money involved, the window that food provides into identity and culture, food's influence on educational policy and politics, and the social justice concerns around food.

Driven largely by concerns over boys' education, countries worldwide have seen crisis discourses over small numbers of male teachers, particularly those teaching young children. Despite public desires and policy movements to increase their numbers, important barriers and challenges remain for male teachers. Preservice teachers' experiences, especially, might illuminate challenges to the recruitment and retention of males. Using a (pro)feminist, social interactionist framework and qualitative discourse analysis methods, this study examines discouragements from peers, family, and teacher education as faced by three male student teachers. These included gendered teasing about the ease of and “cuteness” required in education coursework, gendered objections to “wasting” their ability, and gendered suspicions of sexual predation. The analysis focuses on strategic performances the men used to cope with discouragements and persist in teaching. I argue that foregrounding such performances can disrupt barriers for males and thus increase their numbers.

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Fields from political science to critical education policy studies have long explored power relations in policy processes, showing who influences policy agendas, policy creation, and policy implementation. Yet showing particular actors’ influence on specific points in a policy text remains a methodological challenge. This article presents a five-stage, embedded mixed methods design for establishing influence on educational policy moving from a policy text outward. I use an example analysis of Australia’s policy making on boys’ education—the report Boys: Getting it Right (2002)—to show how data transformation measures, both quantitizing and qualitizing, within a larger qualitative study helped identify influence. This mixed design, I argue, can be useful in other research contexts, with variations for data availability and researcher resources.