Learning power globally?

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Education and Access (IDEA) at the University of California Los Angeles (UCLA) has been characterised during the last 10 years by strong connections between academic work and social action in supporting disenfranchised groups that try to improve education, promote equity politics and change the world. This work has been documented in many articles and shared with the educational and academic community on conferences (see for example Oakes & Lipton, 1999; Oakes, Quartz, Ryan, & Lipton, 2000). Learning Power brings all these initiatives together in a coherent framework. It reads like a journey into a part of American social, political and educational reality that is not visible in the European media. It shows that in the US some people really work on democracy, not as a formal institution but as a way of life. The book illustrates in great detail how researchers, teachers and students at IDEA work on educational change. In these presentations and analyses they demonstrate and develop new views on important concepts of educational change. They clearly show that educational change is a social and political activity and that educational change theorists should incorporate explicit political processes in their concepts. They also show that by making political choices in their practical and theoretical work, the level of working and understanding is deepened. The practice and theory they present is far removed from a technical rationality that is so dominant in many works on educational change. Instead of saying that the social and political context is part of the reality they make it part of change processes and their theoretical framework itself. For example, while many American publications on educational change argue that education should connect to the community, this is often presented as a general and mechanical connection. Oakes and Rogers show that the community is a