The recent review of the Scottish professional standards for teachers, led by the General Teaching Council for Scotland, offered a unique perspective to interrogate participative approaches in policy-making in the Scottish education context and to provide insights and implications for future policy-making. Using one of the authors' experiences as…

We combine empirical experimental research on biased argument processing with a computational theory of group deliberation to overcome the micro-macro problem of sociology and to clarify the role of biased processing in debates around energy. We integrate biased processing into the framework of argument communication theory in which agents…

Bullying remains a serious problem in schools in England and internationally despite the plethora of research, interventions and policies which aim to address it. The majority of research and interventions are based on a traditional approach where school bullying is constructed as involving a clear imbalance of power between individuals. Recently,…

Generative AI (GenAI) is transforming higher education. It has already challenged the validity of traditional assessment methods and revealed concerns about the authenticity and reliability of conventional approaches. This opinion piece proposes an expanded theoretical framework for contextual learning, incorporating practical, situational,…

The bureaucratic precepts engendered by modern universities produce a slew of negative effects inimical to educational justice. Drawing on historiographical evidence from the 1968 Strax Affair, a little-known protest held at the University of New Brunswick, we identify the arts of discombobulation as a novel approach to challenge the intellectual…

Our current cultural climate is marked by a convergence of pressing issues, including the rise of the post-truth situation, which has recently been described as an epistemic crisis (Hoggan-Kloubert & Hoggan, 2023). This conceptual paper outlines why adult education institutions must reclaim the pursuit of truth as undergirded by rationality,…

This article examines the ways in which teachers and community-based activists collaborated to advance an anti-privatisation agenda within an urban school district. The article emerges from our respective studies of privatisation in Oakland, one a historical study of the advance of neoliberalism and the other a case study (Merriam 2007,…

Policy cycles are initiated via a variety of context-bound causal drivers. In situations where systemic reform is desired, agenda-setting is vital to this process. This paper examines 'The National Discussion on Scottish Education', which was a sequence of stakeholder engagements promoted as a listening exercise to enable policy agenda-setting for…