Outdoor education in Ireland, as in many countries, takes place in a variety of physical locations ranging from urban to wilder, minimally human influenced environments. Irish public outdoor education providers have traditionally placed little emphasis on cultural understandings of the places where learning occurs. Moreover, outdoor education…

This paper uses the critical realist concept of human reflexivity to dev­elop a theoretical critique of the notion of 'skills' in current policy discourses, particularly in vocational education. We argue that current policy reifies skills as market commodities and alienates them from the minds, bodies, and hands of those who exercise them and the…

The debate about the ethics of belief is a classic and it has given rise to wide-ranging debates in epistemology, the philosophy of language, the philosophy of mind, as well as in ethics. In epistemology, the question is what the norms of belief are -- should one believe what is true, what is well-evidenced, what is pragmatic or what? -- and this…

After the Second World War, the Italian educational context in Italy was distinguished by a network of different democratic and antiauthoritarian pedagogical ideas and educational experiences, developed as heterogeneous forms of New Education. The "Movimento di Cooperazione Educativa" (MCE), inspired by Freinet's popular pedagogy and…

This article explores the diverse epistemic perspectives on intelligence, tracing its conceptual evolution across early Indian philosophy, Western philosophical thought and contemporary computational theories. Intelligence is examined as a dynamic, multifaceted phenomenon that transcends mere cognition, extending into embodied, ecological and…

Siegel claimed that teachers are obliged to provide grounds whenever demanded, as a result of which they must be able to subject to scrutiny whatever they teach. In this paper, however, and taking as a reference Wittgenstein's "On Certainty," it is shown that such a demand cannot work for second language teachers because their main task…

This article comprises a lyrical exposition of the 'in-betweenness' that underlies pedagogical relations and musical practice. The latter comprises making, performing, teaching, and indeed listening to music, phenomena encapsulated in the term 'musicking', first coined by the musicologist Christopher Small in 1999. Improvisatory practice is…

In this study we investigated: (i) the historical development of Songyang Academy, and (ii) the educational philosophy and general education of Songyang Academy. This research employs qualitative research methods, including document analysis and field data collection through surveys, interviews, observations, group discussions, and workshops.…

This qualitative research study explores the impact of in-depth exploration of race in theology on student learning in a voluntary reading group at a Protestant university in Tanzania and students enrolled in a theology course at a Catholic college in the United States. The unique course featured students gathering at their own institutions and…

This paper explores how Hannah Arendt's view of education as love (1958) can contribute to refreshed perspectives of democratic education. In recent decades, the task of contemporary early childhood education has gradually moved towards an enhanced focus on individual learning and freedom of choice, closely intertwined with an image of the child…

Today lively debates are unfolding about artificial intelligence (Jackson, 2024; Peters et al., 2024; Sidorkin, 2024). Despite these debates, the topic remains undertheorized (Gourlay, 2024) in relation to various matters pertaining to its use, benefits, risks, and implications. As argued in a recent editorial for this journal (2024), it is…

In this paper, we argue that the attempts to centre education in one of its three constitutive aspects that have long determined the discourse on the purpose and aims of education run the risk of one-sidedness. Theories of student-centred education have been in vogue for many centuries now, having been born out of a polemic against teacher-centred…

Philosophical anthropologies (PAs) -- ontological assumptions about human species-nature -- have long faced Foucauldian post-structural rejection of their value and legitimacy in explaining sociological problematics. In this article I endorse Bourdieu's resistance to a post-PA momentum, arguing that PAs need assuming in sociological research. In…

School bullying is widespread, and a common phenomenon is that those who are bullied remain silent, rather than talking about their experiences. This paper explores a case of victim silence through the recollections of a woman who was bullied at school. Drawing on Levinas' concept of the 'Other' and the notion of the 'underworld', we analyse why…

This article examines contemporary educational practices within the rapidly evolving landscape of Artificial Intelligence. We do so by analysing the relationship between artificiality and naturalness in education. Education, often characterized as a human and thus natural-historical phenomenon, now appears increasingly shaped by artificial…