The university is promoted as "a place from where to speak". Academic freedom is examined as a crucial value in an increasingly uncertain age which resonates with Barnett's concern to encourage students to overcome their "fear of freedom". My concern is that the putative university space of freedom and autonomy may well become constricted by those…

The U.S. Supreme Court's recent opinion in "Morse v. Frederick" (2007), perhaps better known as the "Bong Hits 4 Jesus" case, contains a widely reported concurrence by Justice Clarence Thomas. Challenging well-established precedent, Thomas argues that students should have no constitutional rights in school. In this essay David Blacker argues that,…

Alison Cook-Sather begins this review essay with a discussion of David Tyack and Larry Cuban's generative phrase "the grammar of schooling" to provide context for her examination of three texts that address the challenges of school reform: John Sylvester Lofty's "Quiet Wisdom: Teachers in the United States and England Talk About…

This chapter describes social capital theory as a framework for exploring women's networking and social capital resources. It presents the foundational assumptions of the theory, the benefits and risks of social capital engagement, a feminist critique of social capital, and the role of social capital in adult learning.

The Capability Approach (henceforth CA) is in the first place an approach to the evaluation of individual well-being and social welfare. Many disciplines refer to the CA, first and foremost welfare economics, development studies and political philosophy. Educational theory was not among the first disciplines that took notice of the CA, but has a…

Drexel University's Couple and Family Therapy Department recently introduced a formal course on training the person of a therapist. The course is based on Aponte's Person-of-the-Therapist Training Model that up until now has only been applied in private, nonacademic institutes with postgraduate therapists. The model attempts to put into practice a…

The matter of cities is, as urban critic Jane Jacobs argued, a complex problem akin to the life sciences. As a rich tradition of philosophical and geographical thought has suggested (Bergson, Lefebvre, and Harvey), the city is not a thing but a process. In order to reconcile process methodology and pedagogy, this essay explores six key ideas…

This author arrived at the Folger Shakespeare Library in 1981 kind of by accident, a DC public high school English teacher on hiatus from the classroom due to burying parents and birthing children. She was on her way back to that classroom, but the opportunity to work in the land of all things Shakespeare was too good to pass up, even though there…

In the current socio-political climate pedagogies consistent with rationalism are in the ascendancy. One way to challenge the purchase of rationalism within educational discourse and practice is through the body, or by re-thinking the nature of mind-body relations. While the orientation of this paper is ultimately phenomenological, it takes as its…

Action research can be understood as a complex interplay between local circumstances and local research traditions, embedded in their turn in local intellectual-philosophical traditions, national as well as international. Because of this interplay it is questionable whether it would be particularly fruitful to look for 'typical local forms of…

The new field of Mind, Brain, and Education (MBE)--sometimes called educational neuroscience--is posited as a mediator between neuroscience and education. Several foundational concerns, however, can be raised about this emerging field. The differences between neuroscience and education are many, including differences in their histories,…

If teaching is a political act, how can teachers hope to make a difference through their work? In this review essay, Julian Edgoose explores this question of hope in relation to three recent books: David Halpin's "Hope and Education," Jonathan Kozol's "Letters to a Young Teacher," and Jonathan Lear's "Radical Hope." Halpin describes how hope comes…

Educational undertakings are subject to disjunctures at three separate stages: in the creation of curricular programmes, in the implementation of these curricula in practice and in their effects on students. These disjunctures are the result of complex "leaps" between ends and means, and between ideal and real. This article proposes a response in…

The authors review Judith Suissa's provocative book, "Anarchism and Education: A Philosophical Perspective," a text that demonstrates the central role of education in anarchist theory. Suissa compellingly argues against the charges that anarchism is overly idealistic and impractical, instead seeing its potential for innovative and liberatory…

Constructivism claims to be a postepistemology that replaces "traditional" concepts of knowledge. Supporters of constructivism have argued that progress requires that pre-service teachers be weaned off traditional approaches and that they should adopt constructivist views of knowledge. Constructivism appears to be gaining ground rapidly and should…