Music education research has in recent years been interested in defining music education's societal mission. Concepts such as praxial music education, artistic citizenship, or an activist approach tried to determine that music education's foremost task would be to transform societies. This seemed urgent in view of global crises. But is music…

While the fresh debate on education's autonomy continues in this special issue as in other forums and venues, new layers of complexity on this theme continue to emerge, just as further nuances are revealed in the course of discussion. Following this welcomed growth in the discussion, and in the spirit of characterizing autonomy--and therefore also…

Civics courses have a great significance -- they are supposed to train new cohorts of citizens to engage in multiple public roles in (democratic) society. How it is done depends on a multitude of factors, and teachers' performance and program contents are among the most important. In post-authoritarian order like Poland, civic contents of…

The article analyses the theatre of Sixt Birck, an evangelical teacher of the Reformation era, within educational and practical pedagogical background of the period. It is proved that in Basel, when school reform was in process, Birck, having studied Melanchthon's commentaries on Terence and Quintilian's theory of imitation and become familiar…

This article describes educational pluralism as a common approach to schooling in which the government funds a wide variety of schools and holds all of them academically accountable. Educational pluralism implies a diverse structure (i.e., schools that differ from one another in meaningful ways) and a common academic content (i.e., all schools…

Ten years have passed since the first meetings of Arts advisors to start identifying the priorities and approaches that the Arts may take when formalised into a national curriculum structure. Now the time has come for reviewing the past to inform the future. Now is the time for reviewing, interrogating and challenging the "Australian…

Building on and going beyond Young and Muller's theory of powerful knowledge, this article seeks to articulate a model of a future-oriented, knowledge-rich curriculum by invoking David Lambert's "capabilities" approach and "Bildung"-centred "Didaktik." The curriculum is "knowledge rich" in three respects.…

We examine school governance in populist era, using contemporary readings of pragmatist philosophy. We are in a "populist moment," a time of uprisings and movements of the "demos" making political claims (Mouffe, 2018). School officials in the U.S. are subject to an array of political demands in the form of protests and…

Epistemic injustices are wrongs done concerning a person's capacity as a knower. These actions are usually caused by prejudice and involve the distortion and neglect of certain marginalized groups' opinions and ways of knowing. A type of epistemic injustice is hermeneutical injustice, which occurs when a person cannot effectively communicate or…

To confront the major challenges of the 21st century, doctoral students need to be able to think and work across disciplinary boundaries. I have been inspired by the "Interdisciplinary Research: Process and Theory" (2017) textbook, by Allen Repko and Rick Szostak, to reform an interdisciplinary doctoral curriculum in Singapore. For…

This paper locates the main challenge for education in cosmopolitanism within the nature of education when interpreted as a "mind-making process." Based on this interpretation, education is currently a process that shapes non-cosmopolitan minds, for the practices generally associated with it habituate the human mind to see…

In times of deep crisis, the most powerful critical contemplative pedagogy available to us is that of supporting all children and youth in learning to teach and teaching to learn as a primary path toward self-realization, social inquiry and civic contribution. This vital opportunity should be made accessible to all students, regardless of…

State educational standards prescribing curricular and instructional objectives reveal much about the nation's lack of consensual understanding of patriotism. For example, many state standards finally encourage a non-committal arms-length approach to the study of American ideals in government and tradition. Yet, if students are to understand the…

This essay explores new avenues towards challenging inequity in these dark times. In these dark times, neoliberalism has coopted discourses that once challenged inequality and systems of power. Social justice, diversity, and identity politics--once powerful discourses that challenged inequality--have now been adopted by those in power to sustain…

Globally climate change (CC) is scarcely addressed in school curricula, and school graduates are mostly uneducated about climate change. The purpose of this paper is to make a case for conceptualising CC as a discipline, and to further argue why CC should be included in school curricula as a disciplinary-subject. An initial examination of CC in…