Two practices in education--community-based learning and deliberative democratic discourse--have been lauded as highly effective in instilling democratic values in students and preparing them to be active citizens. Both practices have the potential to facilitate the formation of publics in the Deweyan understanding--the building block of…

Daisaku Ikeda proclaimed that Africa would be the beacon of hope for the world in the twenty-first century. Contemporaneously, Kwame Nkrumah was excited about the potentially galvanizing role a united Africa might play on the world scene. Nkrumah envisioned the reawakening of an African personality, which would provide the foundational essence for…

This paper explores the task of learning virtue through the lens of self-determination theory. Drawing on SDT's account of motivation and of innate psychological needs, I defend a theory of learning virtue that emphasizes knowing why virtue is important is pivotal to the development of virtue.

Given the increased interest in character education across the world, educators are seeking guidance for their practice. This paper seeks to add to the evidence base about if and how character can be taught by discussing the results of a pilot evaluation (n=527) of a curriculum intervention designed to enhance two components of character: virtue…

Gert Biesta criticises deliberative models of democracy and education for being based on an understanding of democracy as a 'normal' order, which involves certain 'entry conditions' for democratic participation. As an alternative, Biesta introduces the idea of democracy as 'disruption' and the associated subjectification conception of education…

Condemnation is ubiquitous in the social world and adults treat condemnation as a costly signal. We explore when children begin to treat condemnation as a signal by presenting 4- to 9-year-old children (N = 435) with stories involving a condemner of stealing and a noncondemner. Children were asked to predict who would be more likely to steal as…

Research on quantitative judgments from multiple cues suggests that judgments are simultaneously influenced by previously abstracted knowledge about cue-criterion relations and memories of past instances (or exemplars). Yet extant judgment theories leave 2 questions unanswered: (a) How are past exemplars and abstracted cue knowledge combined to…

Background: Educational and developmental psychologists often examine how groups change over time. Two analytic procedures -- analysis of covariance (ANCOVA) and the gain score model -- each seem well suited for the simplest situation, with just two groups and two time points. They can produce different results, what is known as Lord's paradox.…

Since the rise of mass schooling in the 19th century, Americans have advocated for the teaching of science at nearly every level of the educational system. The reasons for its inclusion in the school curriculum, though, have varied over the years. The argument in the mid 1800s, for example, centered on the utilitarian value of scientific knowledge…

We examined if an adapted version of a brief social psychological intervention following a multi-threat framework can enhance the mental task performance of female college students under stereotype threat. In experiment 1, under self-as-target stereotype threat, as expected, students who were exposed to the self-affirmation intervention had the…

This article constitutes a literature review, focusing on the idea of holistic learning, as found in key sources, and its essential contrasting with instrumentalist approaches to learning. It will move to explore updated research on holistic learning factors, with special attention to insights gleaned from values pedagogy and the research that…

The use of photography representing human distress in higher education warrants moral attention, owing to the imperative that we avoid objectifying the vulnerable communities who are often represented in those images. Assuming the fundamental Kantian precept that we should always treat others as ends and never merely as means, I extend this…

Writing a personal Teaching Philosophy Statement (TPS) can be useful for articulating espoused beliefs related to teaching and learning. In this paper, general approaches to the writing of a TPS are first explored, and the range of possible uses are examined. The article then goes on to consider the development and implementation of an…

In the field of character education role-modelling is advocated as an important pedagogical strategy. It is supposed that students learn from "significant others" who exemplify important virtues and values. However, in these strategies it is not clear what and how students precisely can and should learn from exemplars and how the…

J. J. Rousseau, thinker of the Age of Enlightenment, breaks a new ground in education with his work "Emile." In his novel, "Emile" is the name of the child he has grown up imaginatively. Rousseau, describing Emile's life and his relationship with his instructor from birth to adolescence, discusses teacher-student relationship,…