Nature kindergartens present opportunities to foster a love of natural environments through formative early childhood experiences. Three early childhood education settings -- one in Denmark, one in Finland and one in Scotland -- provided insight into nature kindergarten provision that has historically attracted a high proportion of male staff. At…

Democratic education focuses on developing students using democratic principles and processes in the classroom. In this study, we aim to understand how self-identified democratic educators practice democratic education in public-school classrooms. Nine participants, teachers in K12 schools, were interviewed for this qualitative study. In…

In this article, an evaluation of the English early childhood education context reveals children constructed as data. The complex, chaotic and unpredictable nature of the child is reconstituted in numerical form -- a form which can be measured, compared and manipulated. Children are reconceptualised as data doppelgängers, ghostly apparitions which…

The social pedagogic tradition has been integral to the culture of early childhood education including School Age Childcare (SAC) in Denmark for decades. Drawing upon interviews with multiple stakeholders: lecturers, representatives of an Education Research Institute, union activists an SAC provider and a policy maker, in Copenhagen, Denmark, this…

Many LGBTQ educators approach identity management with great caution, but what types of identity management do these teachers employ when teaching in an area characterised by evangelical fundamentalism that heavily influences education and society such as the area known as the Bible Belt? The purpose of this study was to explore the experiences of…

Higher education in Asia is massifying at an exceptional pace and scale. In this paper, I ask how practices and discourses which inform the internationalization of Singapore's higher education can provide opportunities for developing cosmopolitan learning that it claims to provide. Cosmopolitan learning is closely related to cross-border student…

Over the past 200 years, early childhood provision in Germany has primarily been oriented towards the goal of work-care reconciliation. Even though there is a long tradition in Germany of education-oriented approaches, the primary goal has always been care. The extensive development of early childhood centres for children under three years of age…

The article demonstrates how the views of Russian academics have evolved over time. These views cover topics from the falsification and ideological rejection of the ideas of John Dewey to the objective contextual readings and interpretations of his major works. [This article was translated by Kenneth Cargill.]

The contributions and challenges of Gadamer's philosophical hermeneutics and Freire's critical pedagogy to research and practice in environmental education are considered. We present the authors' main concepts and relate them to the principles of critical environmental education that have guided our work in Brazil. Although a raft of current…

The dialogical character of Wittgenstein's "Philosophical Investigations" has received scant attention in the literature, given the work's status in his total oeuvre, and is dismissed as a marginal as compared to the other differences between the "Tractatus" and the "Investigations." The main lines of interpretation…

Childhood represents the passage into and through constrained notions of spatio-temporal identity and normative constructions. The role of education is too frequently understood as the shaping of life and purpose in the service of democratic ideology. I propose another examination embracing historical anthropologies of education troubling…

The present article focuses particularly on the role and significance of the arts in the process of primary schooling in Tagore's school. He defined education as that which is one with life, and he believed that only education can give us real freedom. It is therefore essential that in the process of education we achieve the all-round development…

"Cruel optimism" is a term coined by Lauren Berlant. In conceptualizing this term, Berlant draws on the resources of critical theory to interrogate people's desires for things they think may improve their lot, but actually act as obstacles to flourishing. This notion may be useful for analysing the current state of education in…

This paper is concerned with the practical importance of different forms of paternalism for educational theory and practice. Contrary to the traditional treatment of paternalism as a sometimes necessary and rather messy aspect of educational practices, I demonstrate that paternalism is to be regarded as an "indigenous concept" (Herbart)…

This paper makes a case for love as a powerful force for "transforming power" in our educational institutions and everyday lives, and proposes that "revolutionary love" serves as a moral and strategic compass for concrete individual and collective actions in critical education. The paper begins by reviewing current…