The purpose of this article is threefold: to offer a vision of human flourishing in the academy premised upon 'living in truth', embracing lived experience and being in relation; to explore counterfactual thinking across the life-course, from the period of compulsory schooling to the end of life, with the emphasis on the latter; and to critique…

Humility is widely regarded as a moral excellence and telos, hence, openly inculcated-instructed. Character education in and for humility, however, sits uncomfortably against today's pedagogical maxims such as self-esteem and self-assertiveness. This article looks into this and other tensions from the perspective of humility as experience…

Small human complex systems, here called co-present groups, are found across all fields of human social life. Complexity thinking suggests why this is so: that these groups, irrespective of formal content, have a meta-function of providing maximum complexity to manage the "indeterminacy" or "uncertainty" that characterises the…

This work engages with Karen Barad's philosophy and theory of agential realism through research practices of critical autoethnography and arts-based methods. The work explores how knowledge, memory, language, and experience remain alive within practitioners and inform who we become and how we inherit the stories involved in being educators and…

This study explores the views of death in the ideas of Kierkegaard and Heidegger to discuss the educational meaning of death and the direction of death education. What both thinkers have in common is, first, that death is not universal, but that each individual is independently aware of his or her own death. Second, both thinkers observe that we…

In this article, I aim to vindicate the belief that many teachers have that their intuitions, insights, or perceptions are legitimate--and indispensable--guides for their teaching. Perceptions can constitute knowledge. This runs counter to some number of views that emphasize "reflective practice" and teachers as "reflective…

This article draws on different bodies of knowledge in order to review the potential role of outdoor education in providing nature-based experiences that might contribute to sustainable living. A pragmatic perspective is adopted to critique what outdoor education is, and then what it might be. Phenomenology is used to challenge the belief that…

Physical education is often justified within the curriculum as academic study, as a worthwhile activity on a par with other academic subjects on offer and easy to assess. Part of the problem has been that movement studies in physical education are looked upon as disembodied and disconnected from its central concerns which are associated with…

This article examines the concept of the stranger and the experience of strangeness in Albert Camus's "The Stranger." These themes have a range of synergies with educational thought. They also lead us to other concepts that may have a place in educational debate, in particular the concepts of the absurd and rebellion. This train of thought also…

Experience is one of the major paths to growth and autonomy, and as such, of outstanding educational value. But it also has a much wider sociocultural context, rooted in life itself. It is about learning that which cannot be taught, learning to think, which precedes all other-defined forms of education. It is an encounter with the unknown, where…

This is the second section of an article (each section in subsequent regular issues of EPAT) that explores the concept of participation. Section I: Introduction and Early Perspectives grounds our exploration of participation and explores definitions and early perspectives of participation we have identified as "historically original" and…

There are various programmes currently advocated for ways in which children might encounter philosophy as an explicit part of their education. An analysis of these reveals the ways in which they are predicated on views of what constitutes philosophy. In the sense in which they are inquiry based, purport to encourage the pursuit of puzzlement and…

Contemporary educational theorists focus on the significance of Dewey's conception of experience, learning-by-doing and collateral learning. In this essay, I reexamine the chapters of Dewey's "Democracy and Education," that pertain to thinking and highlight their relationship to Dewey's "How We Think: A Restatement of the Relation…

The servant lives within the social relations of feudal class estrangement. He is a natural moralist who keeps his eyes and his mind open, amidst the compromises, intricacies, and oppression of being a servant, and he sees and understands a good deal more than those around him. Above all, he is a craftsman of experience who, in making history with…

In this essay, I attempt to interpret the educational philosophy of John Dewey in a way that accomplishes two goals. The first of these is to avoid any reference to Dewey as a propagator of a particular scientific method or to any of the individualist and cognitivist ideas that is sometimes associated with him. Secondly, I want to overcome the…