Reading and Teaching Ivor Goodson

Yvonne Downs earned her PhD in the School of Education at the University of Sheffield. Using a life history methodology, it is a critical evaluation of the meanings of value in respect to higher education and was funded by the Economic and Social Research Council in the United Kingdom. She is currently researching in the field of financial ethics and the formation of professional identities in the accounting profession.

«I suspect that I am not alone in finding it difficult to imagine a contemporary landscape of educational studies untouched by Ivor Goodson’s life/work. This book charts how Ivor, as public intellectual and ‘travelling organic scholar’, has had a global influence on scholarship, theory, methodology, understandings of schools and schooling, curriculum, educators’ lives and so much else. Yvonne Downs’s engaging interpretation of and commentary on Ivor’s writings offers us new insights, building on and illustrating the importance of locating personal stories of action within theories of context, an imperative which has always been central to Goodson’s commitment to challenging injustice through informed critique. I’ve been privileged to know and work with Ivor. This book offers those who have not been as lucky as I was a sort of virtual opportunity to spend some time in his company.» (Pat Sikes, Professor of Qualitative Inquiry, University of Sheffield, United Kingdom)