This essay by René Arcilla examines Jean-Luc Nancy's understanding of the "spirit of 1968." It argues that Nancy's concept can guide a humanist approach to educating citizens for participation in democratic self-government, one that responds to the political challenges facing us today. In particular, it develops a critique of…

This article engages Stefano Harney and Fred Moten's conception of 'black study' (2013. "The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning and Black Study." Wivenhoe: Minor Compositions.) as an enactment of a feminist ethics of response-ability. As such, this article inquires: how might 'we' conceive of study as a response-able practice of 'collective…

This article problematizes the view that music education is primarily justified on account of its uniquely "humanizing" influence. Not only does this general humanist argument clearly fail to convince policy-makers to actually revalidate public music education, but moreover it often seems to rest on highly questionable premises. Without…

Friedrich Froebel is often positioned in contemporary landscapes of early childhood education as a 'pioneer', strongly associated with an emphasis on self-directed activity and learning through nature. While Froebel's philosophy has clearly had an impact on how we think about young children today, in this article we argue that we need to…

This article connects instrumental, emancipatory, and critical approaches to Education for Sustainable Development (ESD) with the different cultural responses or grand narratives of the Anthropocene: eco-modernist, eco-catastrophist, and eco-socialist. The tensions between these different approaches are explained by ESD's reliance on the ideals of…

This paper examines literacy as a sociocultural, personal and human practice dependent on and derived through relationships between people, settings and culture. Drawing on a recent empirical research study that combines learner, teacher and author perspectives [Curtin (2023) "Reading and Writing Pathways Through Children's and Young Adult…

I Dream with and through a positionality that lacks critical theorizing in Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM) education research: Students labeled with disabilities; Disability beyond students' accommodations. Understanding this marginalized population can push humanistic STEM scholarship to disrupt ableism by design, thereby…

We examine the ideal twenty-first century learner as discursively produced in recent future-oriented documents published by the OECD and UNESCO. Drawing inspiration from Bacchi's question 'What is the problem represented to be?', we identify a constellation of interrelated discourses that together craft an image of a post-political, resilient,…

Informed by a cultural understanding of human sense-making, the mathematical identities of Grades 7-12 learners, teachers, and conventional curricula are explored. Due to a clash of values between mathematics and the humanities, a majority of learners do not achieve their mathematical potential. This frustrates both these learners and their…

Through a Foucauldian theoretical framework, this article contests the efficacy of the modern assessable and visible learning curriculum, and analyses how the current education episteme disempowers the ethical subjectification of the individual, dislocating the development of aesthetic agency. It articulates a tension between education for the…

This article establishes a rational, feasible, and necessary conclusion to reform high school science content into an equitable experience for its wide diversity of students' self-identities. Research indicates that 85% of graduates would not normally have enrolled in any science course unless required. Their values are more aligned with their…

Background: This article explores the methodological foundations for a utopian methodology as a form of Design-Based Intervention Research (DBR) that can guide the process of envisioning, implementing, sustaining, and critically evaluating the more radical forms of educational activity systems that prefigure the utopian goal of an equitable and…

This paper analyses the development of UNESCO's Mahatma Gandhi Institute on Education for Peace and Sustainable Development (MGIEP), examining its record from global, national and institutional perspectives. The global perspective encompasses challenges to UNESCO's attempts to articulate a distinctive, humanistic vision in competition with other…

This paper examines the learning and performance of the air traffic control (ATC) work domain. This domain was chosen because it embodies features that represent future work for many other industries (e.g., information service provision mediated by information technologies; a high reliance on communication skills and collaborative work; increasing…

This paper examines the loss of culture as a possible effect of the neoliberalisation of education, especially higher education. The paper opens with a brief comparison between the humanistic education founded on the idea of culture (i.e. Bildung) and its modern-day neoliberal form, with the help of José Ortega y Gasset's reflections on the…