This paper shares the Irish adult educator's experiences of Quality Assurance (QA). Educators are found to be largely supportive of QA but contradictions emerge. These include philosophical tensions, inconsistent moderation and incongruence between the stated values of QA and a more powerful government-led employability discourse.

This paper is concerned with ways to make our education system more inclusive, to stimulate a more tolerant and democratic attitude among students, and to equip them to deal with complex issues in our society. Trying to understand and master plural viewpoints is more effective than applying the mainstream western perspective to relate to a…

Interest in progressive education ideas has often been accompanied by advocacy for greater use of interdisciplinary and holistic learning approaches, as these are considered beneficial in conceptual, curriculum, and pedagogical terms. The paper reviews the possibilities for progress on this basis and contextualises the paper around three…

John Dewey is known as the father of American experiential education. His views on building understanding in children through experiences in a correlated curriculum continue to influence educational practice to this day. His writings and experiments with experiential education also influenced music and arts education, most recently through the…

Learning invitations are strategies that encourage learners to engage with education. Learning invitations take many different forms but the aim is to create these invitations intentionally and systematically. This might be easier if there were some guidance to different styles of learning invitations. The Dharmic typology proposed builds upon…

Philosophical assumptions about identity, being and belonging have, as is well known, historically been bound together, with their classical nexus being Plato's Socrates, who, because of this, figures as the first philosopher of the city. Especially during moments of crisis, as Socrates' life and death testify, the impulse, both philosophically…

According to Bernard Stiegler, social innovations in the educational field are an antidotical cure for social pathologies wrought by the digitalisation of society. This article explores how Stiegler's social pharmacology links to the human-technical co-constitution thesis that he first expounded in "Technics and Time, 1." Not only do we…

World War I marked an important turning point in progressive education. With the founding of the Progressive Education Association (PEA) in 1919 advocates had an organization that stood against pedagogical formalism. This essay provides a discussion of this new approach to education, the possibilities of the contributions progressive schools made…

Robert Henry Thurston is presented in this article. He provides one the most significant examples of professionalizing engineering through innovative education and promoting scientific education practices in the late nineteenth century. The son of a draftsmen and steam engine mechanic, Thurston spent his early years in Providence, Rhode Island.…

In this article, Turcotte-Summers responds to Eamonn Callan's essay "Education in Safe and Unsafe Spaces" (2016) with three main counterarguments. First, the correct response to the systemic oppressions faced by our students is not a more liberal but a more liberatory and radical education. Second, dignity safety is not a useful…

A previous study has justified the idea that a politically liberal conception of formal education can be applied in a developing democracy if such a society has reached a narrow overlapping consensus on its education system or modifies its education system from a minimally coercive perspective. This study further considers the fundamental question…

In this article, I will argue that the implementation of deliberative democracy needs to be supplemented by a specific political morality in order to cultivate free and equal citizens in exercising public reason for achieving a cooperative and inclusive liberal society. This cultivation of personality is literally an educational project with a…

This article presents an argument for re-reading Jean Baudrillard's ideas considering their potential contribution to the sociology of higher education, particularly in relation to contemporary debates about "world-class" universities. In order to apply Baudrillard's ideas, China's commitment to the development of "world-class"…

This article examines the significance of the concept of participation for teacher meaning-making processes in education for sustainable development and health education. In Scandinavian public schools, education for sustainable development and health education focus on a wide palette of societal problems rather than on narrow curricula. Drawing…

This study investigates experienced teachers' resistance in an era of neoliberalism in Macau. The narratives of three experienced teachers are examined under a post-structuralist framework. The findings indicate that the traditional Chinese Confucian ideology of education guides the experienced teachers' professional practice and offers them an…