This course is an introduction to the controversial structural issues surrounding educational institutions and practices in society. By focusing on the major theoretical approaches that are useful in examining and re-considering the immanent regularities of the school as a dynamic organism, this course is structured around these major purposes:  examining the ways in which schools are embedded within cultural, social, and historical contexts and questioning the role of schools in producing and/or transforming the existing power relations in society. In addition, the course will offer critical engagement with intra-institutional centers, i.e. a set of authority/disciplinary patterns and governance structures, rituals, and micro practices established around the students, administrators, teachers, communities (families). This course does not offer a continuous reflection on the contemporary issues of education, but inhabits instead back and forth encounters of micro and macro level of historically and culturally sedimented discourses that root silently within these circles.

The major objectives of the course are as follows:

-  To become familiar with the nature of relationship between education and social, historical, and cultural regimes along various dimensions.

-  Examining the school as a society within itself with a particular concern about the pervasive ideology, patterns of values, web of authority/governance and their everyday practicalities.

-  Interpreting the connection between everyday life practices performed in educational setting and the surrounding communities, i.e. family, local networks, communities etc.

- To “critically” evaluate all these theoretical approaches.