The article presents an outline of the history of Folk High Schools in Sweden. The analysis includes mainly social and political determinants of their functioning in Poland's northern neighbor. The main trends of the evolution of social functions of these institutions has also been presented in the article encompassing 145 years of their…

Paul S. Boyer was the youngest of the three Boyer brothers, with Bill the oldest and Ernie in the middle. Paul served on the faculty in the history department at the University of Wisconsin at Madison and was referred to by the "New York Times" upon his death on March 17, 2012, as "an intellectual historian who wrote groundbreaking…

Colleges and universities exist within a political arena where external demands for accountability materialize within a market-driven environment. As a result, government agencies pressure colleges and universities to rely on assessment and transparent reporting to become more market-driven assuming that the competition within the market, led by…

The interconnected nature of knowledge in the health sciences is not always reflected in how curricula, courses, and learning activities are designed. Thus have scholars advocated for more explicit attention to connection-making, or integration, in teaching and learning. However, conceptual and empirical work to guide such efforts is limited. This…

One of Canada's greatest public intellectuals, George Grant (1918-1988) studied history as an undergraduate, focusing on concepts and themes rather than minutiae. That same intellectual disposition surfaced later at Oxford, where he had gone on a Rhodes scholarship to study law. Returning to Oxford after the war, he left law to study theology,…

To produce a teaching statement, current and aspiring teachers undertake the ostensibly straightforward task of putting their teaching philosophy onto paper. But upon close examination, the teaching statement--a seemingly simple object--is much more complex. The teaching statement is full of dual functions, many of which can be conceived of as…

This article explores two central notions of "dialectics" and "dialogics" based on the work of Vygotsky (drawing on philosophers such as Hegel, Spinoza, Engels and Marx) and Bakhtin (drawing on members of the Bakhtin Circle and writers such as Dostoevsky and Rabelais) respectively, as well their varying interanimations within…

This article describes how to develop a comprehensive teaching philosophy from articulation through implementation to evaluation. Using literature and teaching-learning experiences, we discuss pragmatic steps for using a teaching philosophy to inform, engage, and evaluate teaching-learning. We promote an integrated teaching philosophy to ensure…

The implementation in 2009-10 of the Early Years Learning Framework (EYLF) spearheaded the efforts of the Australian Commonwealth government to institute a national curriculum. The theme of the new early childhood framework follows three guiding concepts: Belonging, Being and Becoming. In this article, we discuss these three concepts in order to…

Rabelaian carnivalesque provided philosopher Mikhail Bakhtin with a means of exploring the significance of humour through an examination of Middle Age peasant culture and the influence of the Renaissance on its legitimacy. This article argues that a similar phenomenon exists in modern educational settings and provides evidence to suggest that very…

In this 2013 John Dewey Society Lecture I examine the history and the structure of the American system of higher education. I argue that the true hero of the story is the evolved "form" of the American university and that all the things we love about it, like free speech, are the side effects of a structure that arose for other purposes.…

Modern scholarship has struggled to come to terms with the meaning of wisdom and its significance in the field of education. This book examines the importance of pursuing wisdom in schools by turning to ancient and medieval sources for clarification concerning the nature of wisdom. Sean Steel argues that our current emphasis on the development of…

We argue that the distinction between dialogue (after Bakhtin) and dialectic (after Hegel, Marx, Vygotsky), that Matusov has previously highlighted, is of key importance to mathematics education. According to Matusov, for Bakhtin these concepts are incommensurable since dialectics implies and the dialogism denies telos (a target). In this essay we…

The purpose of this study is to clarify for what students do generalize something in learning mathematics. In this study, we make a distinction between generalization and extension, and focus on the function of generalization in terms of its meaning, purpose, and usefulness. Through reviewing literature on generalization and philosophical…

John Dewey provided philosophical accounts on an enormity of issues and ideas within the corpus of his work. Given his incredible productivity, it is especially difficult to locate any singular focus without almost immediately falling into oversimplification. There is, however, a concern that reoccurs with reliable frequency in his work. Dewey's…