Recognizing that online teaching and learning is placed within an environment where neither the teacher nor the student has complete-control is the first step to actioning capabilities towards a humanized environment. The tool that is typically used in higher education, the learning management system (LMS), has a design that constrains learning…

In this commentary, I build on recent interdisciplinary models for embodied cognition with additional perspectives from affective neuroscience, educational psychology, creativity theory, and science education. I invoke William James and John Dewey, pioneers of an embodied philosophy of mind, alongside recent affective neuroscience theory about the…

What do K-12 schools need to do to prepare their students for adult success? This was the question that originally catalyzed the standards-and-accountability movement some 30 years ago, though it seems somehow to have gotten lost. Today the question merits revisiting, because addressing it makes a strong case for taking an integrated approach to…

Ziegler and Phillipson provide a timely, thought-provoking critique of traditional approaches to gifted education. For a long time, the field has searched in vain for the Holy Grail of giftedness. Alas, the essentialist assumption fails because giftedness does not have a single essence that holds its identity, unity, and continuity. Reification of…

This article presents the authors' response to Michael Newman's "Calling Transformative Learning into Question: Some Mutinous Thoughts". The authors begin by noting their appreciation of Michael Newman's challenge to transformative learning theory. In their response, the authors review and comment on the fatal flaws presented by Newman and then…

Epistemologies of situated knowledges, advanced by scholars such as Donna Haraway, Lorraine Code, and Maureen Ford, challenge mainstream epistemology's claim to be the gold standard in determining what counts as knowledge. In this essay, James Lang uses the work of these and other feminist theorists to explicate the notion of situated knowledges…

Effective teaching values the classroom as a learning community in which instructional approaches optimize learning for all students. Contrary to the principles of an equitable learning environment is the use of "me" language by teachers, a practice that promotes the role of teacher as high status and inadvertently excludes students from the…

In this article, the author explores practices and economies of learning that make visible particular practices where educational work is embedded in places other than schools, colleges and universities, or at least in complex interaction with them. To do this, she draws on a body of work she has been involved with over the past ten years,…

In this article, we discuss school schedules and their implications in the context of chronobiological contemporary knowledge, arguing for the need to reconsider time planning in the school setting. We present anecdotal observations regarding chronobiological challenges imposed by the school system throughout different ages and discuss the effects…

Based on a critical re-analysis of cognitive load theory (CLT), Schnotz and Kurschner identified the need for research on more sensitive ways of assessing learner characteristics, both prior to and during instruction, in order to understand learning processes and outcomes. One emergent theme of the papers in this special issue is that the "same"…

In this paper I argue that there is a need to reconnect with the question of purpose in education, particularly in the light of a recent tendency to focus discussions about education almost exclusively on the measurement and comparison of educational outcomes. I first discuss why the question of purpose should always have a place in our…

This commentary dialogues with three articles that analyze the same database about science and religion discourse produced 17 years ago. Dialogues in these three articles and this commentary across space and time allow us to develop new and different understandings of the same database and situation. As part of this commentary, I discuss topics…

The article suggests that stakeholders involved in quality development need a specific competence, called quality literacy, in order to successfully improve learning processes. We introduce and describe quality literacy as a set of competencies that are needed for professional quality development. Quality literacy emphasises the importance of…

Many recent articles, research papers, and conference presentations about Lev Vygotsky's zone of proximal development (ZPD) emphasize the "extended" version of the ZPD that reflects human emotions and desires. In this essay, Michael G. Levykh expands on the extant literature on the ZPD through developing several new ideas. First, he maintains that…

In this paper the influence of the learning context is considered when learning to program. For the purposes of this study, the lectures, study process, previous knowledge or teaching experience and tests comprised the learning context. The article argues that students' experiences of the learning context have important implications for teaching…