The proliferation of the study of Jewish texts in settings of teachers' professional development poses a challenge for teacher educators. What is the study of these texts to provide for teachers? What would be ways for these texts to be studied in order to contribute to the education of teachers? This paper presents four conceptual approaches of…

This paper illustrates how conversations with children can enhance thinking and practice in relation to the development of inclusive education. In particular, evidence from research carried out in a primary school in Cyprus is used to throw light on notions of marginalisation. The study suggests that marginalisation can be conceptualised in four…

In a 1974 essay entitled "Cloud of Smoke, Pillar of Fire," Rabbi Irving Greenberg offered the "working principle"--no statement, theological or otherwise, should be made that would not be credible in the presence of burning children--in response to Christian silence during the Holocaust and as a kind of moral plumb line by which post-Shoah…

This article argues that a problem for the contemporary sociology of education is that it has operated within a "secularisation of consciousness paradigm". This has limited both the depth and the scope of its intellectual enquiries. Sociological analysis which elides a religious dimension not only presents an over-simplified view of…

This paper is an essay on the state of Australian education that frames new directions for educational research. It outlines three challenges faced by Australian educators: highly spatialised poverty with particularly strong mediating effects on primary school education; the need for intellectual and critical depth in pedagogy, with a focus in the…

What distinguishes students' sense-making of the past from historians' thinking is that historians know how to determine the validity of competing truth claims, a rather complex intellectual skill that requires a sophisticated set of heuristics and strategies. One way to help students learn how to determine the validity of competing truth claims…

The purpose of this study was to characterise the development of a preservice physical education teacher's professional activity over the course of training interactions with her co-operating teacher. The student teacher's professional development was studied using a hermeneutic and inductive approach based on the analysis of data from observation…

The article contends that previous scholars have misread George Pierce Baker's efforts by focusing primarily on "The Principles of Argumentation" and the role of logic. Baker's view of logic was more complex than scholars have claimed. He challenged traditional concepts of formal logic, highlighting only those aspects that would help students…

This article examines the significance of emotion for the processes of teaching, studying and learning. The goal is to demonstrate on the basis of both theoretical examination and empirical data that emotional processes are crucial for human learning and should be taken into account in online teaching and learning as well. Emotional factors during…

In this paper Kirsten Fink-Jensen suggests how a phenomenological-hermeneutic perspective can contribute to the knowledge of learning and teaching processes in music education in school. The philosophical frame is Danish philosophy of life, represented by Knud Ejler Logstrup, and Merleau-Ponty's philosophy of body, both pointing to the wholeness…

This book introduces the concept of leadership as the facilitation of constructivist reciprocal processes among participants in an educational community. Chapter 1, "Learning and Leading Theory: A Century in the Making," (Deborah Walker and Linda Lambert) traces the dynamic history of learning and leading during this century, concluding…

Teacher roles in contemporary American schools should be more closely aligned to hermeneutics as the study of meaning (interpretation/understanding). A marriage between Platonic notions of interpretation and the quest for meaning with the interpretive theories of Friedrich Schleiermacher, Wilhelm von Humboldt, Wilhelm Dilthey, and Hans-Georg…

Students begin their college studies with a set of epistemological beliefs about what they think knowledge is and how they think it is learned; for most students, the experience of college alters these beliefs in fundamental, transformative ways. This study explores the relation between epistemological beliefs, motivation, and cognition in two…

A collection of chapters examines the applicability of postmodern/poststructural theory to educational leadership and school restructuring in the United States today. Based on the assertion that educational administration research and publications have been traditional, conservative, and naive, this book presents a review of Weberian positivism,…

This book presents a theory of how adults learn by making meaning of their experiences. Chapter 1 gives an overview of an emerging transformation theory of adult learning, compares it with other theories of adult learning, and describes the dynamics of the process through which one makes meaning of one's experience. Chapter 2 examines the way…