Based on historical sources and publication records in the early 20th century, we suggest that Vygotsky's recognition of the 'paradox' in human learning and his conceptualisation of advanced thinking were largely influenced by Stanislavski's work in theatre. In this paper, we offer some evidence for this argument on Vygotsky's nascent system of…

At a time when there are renewed expressions of concern about how our societies are organised and the health of our democracies, this paper focuses on the role of education in a democracy. Informed by John Dewey's and Martin Buber's accounts of what it is to be educated, and Homi Bhabha's concept of third space work, the paper presents the case…

Raymond Williams was a literary critic, sociologist, novelist, and political activist but above all a teacher, with a theory of education as a societal process running through his work. He styled the UK's educational establishment of the 1960s 'Old Humanists'; guardians of a dominant elite culture who were losing their influence to the new…

The concept of capital has risen in prominence within educational policy and practice in the UK since Ofsted introduced cultural capital into its inspection processes in 2019. At the same time, fractured discourses exist across different types of capital -- one of which concerns capitals that are negative in constitution and/or impact. This paper…

The article moves from a theorisation of the global scale in higher education and knowledge to a critical review of actual global imaginings and practices. Geo-cognitive scales such 'the global' or 'the national' are constituted by three elements: pre-given material structures, the imaginings and interpretations of agents, and the social practices…

This article argues that deliberative theory provides an important contribution in the debate about the legitimacy of an Islamic influence within the British education system. The contribution is a timely one, in light of the tendency to view issues involving Islam and Muslims through the distorting prism of Islamophobia. The contribution of…

Within the community of inquiry literature, the absence of the notion of genuine doubt is notable in spite of its pragmatic roots in the philosophy of Charles Saunders Peirce, for whom the notion was pivotal. We argue for the need to correct this oversight due to the educational significance of genuine doubt--a theoretical and experiential…

This paper first provides a brief overview of the history and current usage of the concept of competence in academic research, and then undertakes a critical discussion of how the term is currently used in educational policy. The running example used throughout the paper is competence in foreign language learning. The PISA study is discussed to…

The focus of the present paper is a critical discussion of the recently developed concept Pedagogy in Practice (PiP) with the intention of improving the concept for future research. PiP aims to understand ongoing educational practice from the students' perspective by interviewing groups of students about their understanding of learning. By…

Educators and educational theorists frequently employ a gardening metaphor to capture several child-centred principles about teaching and children, i.e. teachers must respect a child's unique interests and abilities, recognise what is developmentally appropriate for students, and resist pursuing a narrow set of outcomes. Historically, however,…

Inherent in most school curricula is some sort of curriculum hierarchy--that is, an assumption that some school subjects are more valuable than others. This paper examines the epistemological assumptions that underpin one such curriculum hierarchy, which I refer to as "the traditional curriculum hierarchy". It is a pervasive and…

Unbundling is the process through which products previously sold together are separated into their constituent parts. In higher education, this dynamic has been driven primarily by financial motivations, and spearheaded by the for-profit sector, but also has pedagogical motivations through its emphasis on personalisation and employability. This…

This paper makes a distinctive contribution to the current debates concerning the role of personal mobile technologies (PMTs) in public education. It does this through drawing attention to the imperative to integrate digitally-mediated personalised education with teacher-mediated pluralised education. Premised on the notion that children's…

This article examines the work of educationist Charlotte Mason (1842-1923) to explore the practice of home education in the late nineteenth century. Mason's work reflected and responded to the particular circumstances and concerns of her clientele. She provided a way for parents to compensate for the practical deficiencies of contemporary…

The Scottish Enlightenment is celebrated for its many contributions to the natural sciences, the social sciences and the moral sciences. But for all this attention, one aspect of the Scottish Enlightenment has been almost entirely neglected: its educational theory. This paper aims to illuminate the relationship between the educational theory of…