It's been 20 years since the last 'National Debate' on education led to the launch of Scotland's Curriculum for Excellence with the four capacities in 2004. The curriculum was conceived to 'fully prepare today's children for adult life in the 21st century' (Scottish Executive, 2004, p. 3). These four capacities articulated the aspirational purpose…

This article explores the contribution a social constructionist paradigm can make to the study of career, through a small-scale empirical study of recent graduates employed in New Zealand's state sector. A social constructionist lens denies the possibility of an individualised, generalised understanding of 'career', highlighting instead its local,…

Neoliberalism has an enormous influence on P-12 education in most industrial societies. In this integrative, theoretical literature review, we surveyed the journal articles on neoliberalism in US-based educational research to better understand how neoliberalism has been conceptualized in this body of work and to offer implications for future…

Faced with the incessant concern on the part of national and supranational institutions in promoting, expanding, and implementing education on human rights in schools and educational systems, it is necessary to stand back for a moment and review the political and discursive ways in which these projects work and the mechanisms they are based on…

This essay responds to recent philosophical interest in the Anthropocene by asking (Trachtenberg in "Inhabiting the Anthropocene: how we live changes everything," 2016): Can and should educators adopt, form, transmit, teach ways of living to maintain, if not enhance Earth's habitability, especially its habitability for diverse children?…

This article confronts Zagzebski's exemplarism with the intertwined debates over the conditions of exemplarity and the unity-disunity of the virtues, to show the advantages of a pluralistic exemplar-based approach to character education. This pluralistic exemplar-based approach to character education is based on a prima facie disunitarist…

Drawing on a range of philosophical traditions, this article argues that the humanities are essential aspects of the development of the whole child. The humanities help children to understand themselves and other people in relation to place, time, belief, identity and culture and to become empathetic, thoughtful and critical citizens. Learning the…

In this article we address the current context of intensified racialized state securitization by tracing its roots to the naturalized colonial architectures of everyday modern life--which we present through the metaphor of "the house modernity built." While contemporary crises are often perceived to derive from external threats to the…

Two protagonists Humboldt and Citrine in "Humboldt's gift" are characterized as restless even lunatic, for they are constantly or madly seeking something such as honor, power or intimate relationship something or other. This thesis intends to analyze Humboldt and Citrine's psychological troubles from the perspective of Lacan's theory and…

In this paper we argue that transnational as well as national political demands and expectations on the educational field are contributing to (re)produce four ideological-based educational leadership discourses in the literature. In order to conceptualize these discourses, we turn to the work of Schmidt ("Diagnosis I--Filosoferende…

"Engagement," or "student engagement," is widely used in educational research and public discourse to refer to the problem of public education. The underlying ontological and epistemological assumptions buoying engagement are rarely, if ever, addressed by educational researchers. The "silent omission" (Sidorkin 2014.…

This conceptual paper aims to characterize science teachers' practical knowledge utilizing a virtue-based theory of knowledge and the Aristotelian notion of phronesis/practical wisdom. The article argues that a greater understanding of the concept of phronesis and its relevance to science education would enrich our understandings of teacher…

In a recent article in this journal, Vorster and Quinn offered a set of recommendations on how academic staff developers can advise university lecturers on decolonising their curricula and methods. Their main advice was to integrate more African cultural elements into their teaching. However, Vorster and Quinn's advice is rather general. In this…

One of the guiding questions in this discussion is how is it that certain ideologies become so ingrained and resistant to challenge and scrutiny? The central assumptions sustaining the argument conceive curriculum--the backbone of educational practice--to be an expression of ideological activity; the understanding of ideology as lived experience;…

Neoliberalism and neoconservatism are two ideologies that currently plague education. The individualistic free-market ideology of neoliberalism and the unbridled nationalistic exceptionalism associated with neoconservatism often breed a narrowed, overstandardized curriculum and a hyper-testing environment that discourage critical intellectual…