Victoria Rawlings

This text gives students a depth of understanding about how education influences and shapes society and conversely how society shapes education policy. It has never been more important for students of education to be able to understand the connections between the local and the global in explaining contemporary educational change. This text explains the connection between how the Australian education system has been shaped over time, and how this has influenced the current institutions and policies that comprise the state of education. This comprehensive and theoretical text on the sociology of education helps students engage with the theory of educational sociology and learn how to critically reflect on it.

This book investigates the reasons why the traditional psychological understanding of bullying fails those affected, and deconstructs how bullying is shaped by prominent discourse. By drawing on poststructuralist feminist theory Victoria Rawlings highlights the social and cultural inequalities too often forgotten in analysis of aggressive behaviour in schools, and places particular emphasis on gender and sexuality as facilitating and constraining forces within school environments and bullying discourses. This book provides a necessary assessment as to why current anti-bullying approaches are failing, and offers an alternative explanation as to how and why bullying occurs. This is a timely and authoritative study which is based on qualitative research, including interviews and group sessions which are used to emphasize the real-life experiences of young people in schools today. Interdisciplinary in nature, this book has a broad appeal and will be of special interest to scholars in the fields of gender and sexuality studies, sociology, and education.