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…

This paper examines the connections and disconnections between teacher education policy and research, and considers future opportunities for teacher education research by rethinking the notion of evidence as it is conceptualised in current policy debates. Historically, teacher education was positioned as a training issue, then as a learning issue,…

International development higher education is a distinct space in a vibrant and growing field of higher education studies. This paper examines international development higher education scholarship to highlight its thematic, disciplinary, methodological, and analytical eclecticism. At the heart of international development higher education is the…

Dewey's vision for schooling can perhaps be described as an early positive education, a term now attributed to programmes derived from positive psychology. Positive psychology's goals for education share many of Dewey's ideas about community-mindedness and the role of education in nurturing citizenship. Having emerged from positive psychology,…

This is a short reply to an article by Anders Schinkel published in the "Oxford Review of Education" in December 2015. His article discusses John White's work on education and a meaningful life. In this reply, White shares his belief that one role of education should be to equip people to lead meaningful lives. He explains that this has…

Although there has been considerable debate in contemporary literature on the erosion of the public good in higher education, most of it has been concentrated on the word 'public' rather than on the notion of 'good'. Further, the idea of higher education and the organisations for its delivery have become conflated through a focus on the 'good' as…

In recent times there has been an increase in the number of young people becoming involved with violent extremist networks throughout Western countries. Along with this increase has come a debate regarding the appropriate role of education and educational institutions in countering violent extremism (CVE). This article analyses initiatives…

Flourishing, understood along Aristotelian or quasi-Aristotelian lines as objective "eudaimonic" well-being, is re-emerging as a paradigm for the ideal aim of education in the 21st century. This paper aims to venture beyond the current accounts and Aristotle's own, by arguing that both suffer from a kind of "flatness" or…

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…

Richard Peters and John White have both argued that education should contribute to the meaning people are able to find in or give to life. Both dismiss the idea of ultimate or profound meaning ("the meaning of life") in favour of ordinary meaning, or "meaning in life". Thus they exemplify the trend visible also in the general…

Nationalism is a key resource for the political work of governing Scotland, and education offers the Scottish National Party (SNP) government a policy space in which political nationalism (self determination) along with social and cultural forms of civic nationalism can be formed and propagated, through referencing "inwards" to…

This narrative documentary study depicts two approaches of citizenship education (CE) in Beijing over the past decade--change through curriculum development, versus change through the international exchange of ideals and practices. It reveals the varied interests of CE designers and the tensions arising from competing approaches to CE. Analysis…

Like many senior teacher-educators and educational researchers, John Furlong has faced in several directions throughout his career, sometimes simultaneously. He has clearly not lost his enthusiasm for what happens in the classroom: he strongly appreciates those magical moments which can happen at any time, and which keep teachers going. He loves…

The paper contrasts two different approaches to the educational challenges of the ubiquitous, rapidly developing information and communication technologies (ICT). The first is the constructivist "knowledge building" theory spearheaded by Carl Bereiter and Marlene Scardamalia and recently further developed by Kai Hakkarainen and Sami…

This essay explores the relationship between theories of domestic pedagogy as articulated in eighteenth-century conduct books, and fictional representations of home education in novels of the period. The fictional discussions of domestic pedagogy interrogate eighteenth-century assumptions about the innate superiority of a domestic education for…