Though Montessori teachers and teacher educators are very familiar with the command to "follow the child," few may know where in her writing Montessori says to do this. This article looks at where the concept is referred to indirectly at times. This article also answers the question "what does this really mean in postmodern…

Background/Context: Grit has quickly become one of the leading educational goals and markers of success upheld by many schools, parents, and education policies. This article intends to give us pause in the rush toward grit by revealing some of its shortcomings, including the implications of its individualist and long-term goal focus which leave…

This article interrogates the construction of a visual and sound installation that juxtaposes contemporary material with historical artefacts regarding academic work to offer an aesthetic mode of interruption in explorations of academic voice in university histories and in the contemporary university. Drawing upon Foucauldian histories of the…

This paper draws on data undertaken with very young children within the context of Norwegian kindergartens. Specifically, the paper focuses on non-human and human movements. Mine included, that are undertaken in time and space. Following I argue that as the researcher I am always already entangled in inquiry and that there is no beginning. As a…

According to a widespread view, one of the most important roles of education is the nurturing of common sense. In this article I turn to Gilles Deleuze's concept of sense to develop a contrary view of education--one that views education as a radical challenge to common sense. The discussion will centre on the relation of sense and common sense to…

In the beginning of the 19th century, Humboldt defined Bildung as both process and product of the developing person. In this contribution we discuss how this classical concept may be used for defining subject didactics. We use two complementary approaches to answer it: a historical analysis, and the construction of a theoretical model. 1)…

This paper investigates the prominence of rationalism in the major Western pedagogical theories of Plato, Rousseau, and Dewey, all of whom conceptualize formal teaching, as the inculcation of rationality in individual learners. After each of their theories has been described, the argument turns against the tradition of pedagogical rationalism to…

The following work is intended to be a closer look and commentary on the issue of gun violence and mass shootings in the United States of America. An overarching pragmatic lens will be utilized to argue that the time is now to make a change in our current trajectory of normalized gun violence in our schools, and society in general. We currently…

There is a sustained critique of autonomy in Iris Murdoch's work in moral philosophy and moral education. I explicate Murdoch's arguments against a moral education that aims at autonomy, showing that this kind of moral education is ensnared in problematic dualisms: a fact and value dualism (sometimes discussed as a dualism between metaphorical…

Research that explores ethics can help educational communities engage twenty-first century crises and work toward ecologically and socially just forms of life. Integral to this research is an engagement with social theory, which helps educators imagine our shared worlds differently. In this paper I present two theoretical-methodological directions…

This paper has two interrelated goals. The first is to introduce a framework: oppositional democracy. The second is to use this framework to address what I see as a central problem that occurs when learning to teach: the moment when someone with power tells an aspiring teacher that something she hopes to accomplish is "unrealistic". The…

In thinking the passage from the "all-human cerebrum" (H.G. Wells) to what one might call the contemporary "all-too-human" cerebrum in neo-liberal societies and beyond to the "all-too-transhuman" cerebrum in the cybernetic society, in contrasting Wells's idea of a new world order with the dystopia of the disordering…

This paper sets out to reimagine education through a cultural perspective and explores education as a performative practice that establishes certain borders of 'public' belonging. Wide-spread debates about the public dimension of schools and universities have focused on how economic rationales need to be replaced with alternative visions of…

In this paper, I explore the problems of cultivating a critical attitude in pedagogy given problems with accounts grounded in critical social theory, rational liberalism and pragmatic esthetic theory. I offer instead an alternative account of criticism for education in open, pluralistic, liberal, democratic societies called 'pedagogy of…

In this article, we seek to unpack and enrich the notion of the design concept. We do this through the use of Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari's 'concept' in its philosophical specificity to critique less-effective uses of the design concept. In particular, we investigate the idea that a concept is actually an aggregation of many concepts that…