In this article, I critically engage with a vital assumption behind the work of Paulo Freire, and more generally behind any critical pedagogy, viz. the belief that education is fundamentally about "emancipation." My main goal is to conceive of a contemporary critical pedagogy which stays true to the original inspiration of Freire's work,…

This article attempts a reading of Andreas M. Kazamias's work and method as a persistent and firmly grounded attempt to "go against the tide" of an empirical/instrumentalist comparative education and toward a "modernist 'episteme.'" Kazamias has been explicitly critical of the social-scientific-cum-positivist comparative…

Scholars in different fields have theorised about the value of narrative learning and narrative education for advancing components of civic professional and worldview development. Whilst research into the theory and practice of narrative learning is more widespread in adult and religious education, it is still scarce in the area of democratic…

This article explores the contours of the Indian pragmatist Bhimrao Ambedkar and his reconstruction of Buddhism in the 1950s. As a student of John Dewey at Columbia University, young Ambedkar was heavily influenced by the pragmatist ideas of democracy and reconstruction. Throughout his life he would continue to evoke Dewey's words and ideas in his…

This paper uses John Dewey's ([1916]. "Democracy and Education." New York: The Free Press) to explore the difference between teaching as transmission and teaching as transaction. Proceeding in three sections, the paper clarifies what Dewey understood to be the problems and promises of teaching, as well as the potential of…

This paper provides a review of "Reconstructing 'Education' through Mindful Attention: Positioning the Mind at the Center of Curriculum and Pedagogy" by Oren Ergas. The review examines the central argument of the book, namely that present educational theory and practice avoids substantial self-inquiry, paying lip service to reflective…

Responding to the structural and discursive changes that have (re)shaped the area of higher education in Europe over the last decades, the paper presents an analysis of how and with what educational consequences the purpose and value of higher education governance has shifted towards market-relevance and impact as the primary legitimizing factors…

Textbooks, as a curriculum document text, are subject to nonlinear entry and points of interpretation and implementation. The interpretation of its content is dependent on the reader or the writer, thus making it open to multimodal ways of meaning-making that underscore rhizomatic tendencies. Delueze and Guattari ("A thousand plateaus:…

This modest work of disambiguation begins with the simple recognition that there are 'hermeneutics' and 'hermeneutics', and argues that not all senses of the term have been given sufficient attention in the discussion of what religious education is and could be. I hope to do some important definitional work around the different senses that…

In recent discussions about the widening and opening up of anthropocentric perspectives in environmental and sustainability education (ESE) research, a recurrent issue has been what reasonably could be a subject of inquiry and an agent of knowledge. This article aims to showcase an empirical study of the relevance of human-material relationships…

Kevin Gary, President of the Ohio Valley Philosophy of Education Society, argues that the standard conception of a liberal education espoused by sociologist Max Weber and the Association of American Colleges and Universities (AACU) is built on the illusions of personal autonomy, critical thought, and liberal neutrality. Gary turns to the wisdom…

This research measured the efficacy of experiential learning model proposed in "My Pedagogic Creed" by John Dewey in the perspective of teachers in the local context of Karachi, Pakistan. Literature reported that Dewey had promoted the notion of social interaction, group learning and experiential learning as strategies of teaching in the…

This article aims to explore the recent promotion of reflective practice in teacher education and to draw on the thinking that has developed in adult education, particularly in feminist community education. It endeavours to unpack, briefly, the foundational theories that are promoted in teacher education and identify the failings inherent in these…

This article concerns the relationship between classroom assessments that are aligned with "competencies-based" teaching in Teacher Education programs on the one hand, and on the other hand, the challenge of offering authentic "philosophy of education," "education theory," or "education foundations" courses…

Teaching as a profession can be read as an immortality project, a form of compensation to help resolve a certain kind of existential terror. Terror management theory can help us understand the ways teachers might compensate for their limitedness as humans by imposing prescribed attributes on their students. In response to the freighted reality of…