This paper introduces and summarises a programme of German research into teaching started 20 years ago. This research draws on Herbart's analysis of teaching with its focus on 'Bildung' (formation) which is distinguished from the measurement/psychometric tradition. It offers the possibilities of a deeper empirical understanding of pedagogical…

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,…

Dewey's (1938) theory of experience involved the use of history as "a potent agent in appreciation of the living present" (p. 23). Dewey meant his statement as an educational prescription, but it also has significant research implications. These implications can be understood in terms of studying the history of a topic versus using…

Education as a domain of conceptual activity and a field of scientific/scholarly research needs to address the movement from the traumatized subject to subject-as-trauma. This movement and the concomitant conceptual shift in how we ought to understand the subject correspond, in the domain of education, to the "radicalization" of what…

Philosophers of education have long contemplated how the normative charge of education might include disruption of the status quo. Thinking about our work as being in battle with the status quo, though, is problematic. Partly, the author agrees with thinkers like George S. Counts that education can be a vehicle for social reconstruction. But he is…

In his 2006 essay, "Moral Education's Modest Agenda," Robin Barrow argues for a clearly bounded conception of morality; he presents the moral domain as concerned with moral principles, and moral education as the cultivation of moral understanding. Barrow rejects behaviourism, character education, values clarification, developmentalism,…

This paper aims to show how Emerson provides a reworking of Kantian understandings of moral education in young children's "Bildung." The article begins and ends by thinking of Emersonian self-cultivation as a form of improvisatory or wild "Bildung." It explores the role of "Bildung" and self-cultivation in preschools…

How is one to navigate between a thinking grounded in the individual and a claim for communality? In Emerson, this kind of difficulty comes into view in familiar sentences such as Speak your latent conviction, and it shall be the universal sense.' How does the relationship between the personal and the universal look and function? In this paper, it…

Research on science teaching and learning commonly makes use of reductionism to specify conditions of science learning. In my studies of academics'-of-science-teaching-&-learning (academics'"-of-st&l") research practices and values, I discuss how philosophic inquiry shifted my research practices from reductionism to critical (or,…

The way in which educators choose to engage with learners and to offer opportunities to share knowledge of both the physical world and the world of ideas is an ongoing area of international research interest but remains diffuse and difficult to systematise. This idiosyncratic quality underscores the privileged position of teachers as creative…

According to Mitcham's (Thinking through Technology, The University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 1994) fourfold philosophical framework, technological knowledge and volition, with their origin within human beings, give rise to technological activities expressed as concrete technological objects. Technologies are associated with a wide array of…

In this article, the distinctions between anarchism as a political philosophy are outlined and contrasted with that of liberal democratic theory upon which much of educational philosophy is based. The principles upon which the social anarchist position rests are briefly outlined with respect to the state, authority, and human beings' way of…

A grief-stricken daughter calls out to her deceased mother asking if she can see her--"Si me puedes mirar"--and thus recognize her pain. This title appears in Olga Orozco's "Los juegos peligrosos" (1962), an elegy in which a poetic voice (in this case a daughter) laments the loss of her mother, the woman who recognized and…

This paper explores the concepts of commons and commoning from an educational vantage point. These concepts point to places and activities that are shared, communal and un-privatised, in other words they point to places and practices not yet enclosed or appropriated by capital and market logics. Education is certainly a place and an activity that…

This chapter describes a practice of philosophical meditation as a way to transformation in an Italian context. It makes use of poetic and autoethnographic writing to highlight some features of the method, and offers suggestion for adult education practice.