The typical conference consists of a series of PowerPoint presentations that tend to render participants passive. Students of learning have long abandoned the transfer model that underlies such one-way communication. We propose an alternative theory of conferences that sees them as a forum for learning, mutual inspiration and human flourishing. We…

Here I write an appreciation of Settlage's account of experiences with preservice teachers in the United States. Focusing on his use of notions of narrative and counterstories I explore the politics of experience in education looking at how he uses narrative and story, the politics entailed in the polyvocal evidence he presents and the…

The purpose of this article is to suggest and illustrate a methodological approach for studies of learning in physical education (PE) and sport pedagogy in order to investigate and clarify the relation between how people learn and the settings or context in which they learn. Drawing on the work of John Dewey, the later works of Ludwig Wittgenstein…

In the continuing debate about American competitiveness in the global economy, politicians and educators alike have pointed not to students' test scores, but to their creativity and ingenuity, as models for the rest of the world. Teaching creativity has been a hot-button topic this fall, from the National Academy of Education's annual meeting in…

A key concept in contemporary Catholic educational discourse makes a distinction between religious education and catechesis. This distinction is based on the assumptions of faith commitment on the part of catechesis and the focus on cognitive outcomes on the part of religious education. Many official documents on Canadian Catholic school…

In this paper, I examine the question of how to nurture and develop conscientiousness thinkers and future citizens of diverse liberal-democratic societies from the perspective of virtue epistemology (VE). More specifically, I examine this question in terms of how public schools might frame engagement with religious perspectives in the classroom. I…

The sociotechnical context for learning and education is dynamic and makes great demands on those trying to seize the opportunities presented by emerging technologies. The goal of this paper is to explore certain theories for our plans and actions in technology-enabled learning. Although presented as a successor to previous learning theories,…

The 2014 "Comparative Education Review" bibliography of refereed journal articles on topics relevant to comparative and international education covers all 12 months in 2014 and includes 3,389 entries--a full 30 percent increase over the set of references assembled in the 2013 bibliography. They are drawn from 280 refereed journals, both…

Conceptual development requires learning. It requires learning to make discriminations that were previously unavailable to the subject. Notwithstanding the descriptions of learning available in the psychological and educational literature, there is no account available that shows that it is so much as possible. There can be no such account unless…

Taking Wittgenstein's love of music as my impetus, I approach aporetic problems of epistemic relativity through a round of three overlapping (canonical) inquiries delivered in contrapuntal (higher and lower) registers. I first take up the question of scepticism surrounding "groundless knowledge" and contending paradigms in "On Certainty" (physics…

This paper has two main foci: (1) the history of curriculum design, and (2) implications from the new sciences of chaos and complexity for the development of new forms of curriculum design and teaching implementation. Regarding the first focus, the paper posits that there exist--to use Wittgenstein's phrase--"family resemblances" between Peter…

Complexity theory challenges educational philosophy to reconsider accepted paradigms of teaching, learning and educational research. However, though attractive, not least because of its critique of positivism, its affinity to Dewey and Habermas, and its arguments for openness, diversity, relationships, agency and creativity, the theory is not…

Educator Ernest Boyer believed that well-educated students should do more than master isolated facts. They should understand the "connectedness of things." He suggested organizing curriculum thematically around eight commonalities shared by people around the world. In the book "The Basic School: A Community for Learning," Boyer recommends that…

In his 2001 article "Teaching to Lie and Obey: Nietzsche on Education", Stefan Ramaekers defends Nietzsche's concept of perspectivism against the charge that it is relativistic. He argues that perspectivism is not relativistic because it denies the dichotomy between the "true" world and the "seeming" world, a dichotomy central to claims to…

From Parker Palmer, best-selling author of "The Courage to Teach", and Arthur Zajonc, professor of physics at Amherst College and director of the academic program of the Center for Contemplative Mind in Society, comes this call to revisit the roots and reclaim the vision of higher education. "The Heart of Higher Education" proposes an approach to…