The phenomenon of Catholic Studies cannot adequately be understood without a prior consideration of certain fundamental tensions that mark modern higher education as a whole. These broader tensions characterize Catholic universities in specific and important ways. At the University of St. Thomas, Catholic Studies has proven to be a remarkably…

This article is a follow-up on a previous quantitative study (Steyn, 2007) which explored key aspects that influenced the effective implementation of Invitational Education (IE) in schools in the United States of America (US) and Hong Kong (HK). This is a qualitative study in which an appreciative inquiry (AI) is used to explain staff's positive…

In this essay, the author argues for a reconsideration of the teachers college tradition within teacher ed curriculum. The author draws upon history and moral philosophy to make the case that the teaching profession has declined because teacher educators have neglected the philosophical tradition that the author maintains is the key to our future.…

This article reviews the significance of Jacques Ranciere's work for methodological debates in the social sciences, and education specifically. It explores the implications of constructing research as an aesthetic, rather than primarily a methodological, endeavour. What is at stake in this distinction is the means by which research intervenes in…

Academics are now expected to manage increasingly demanding research, administrative, and teaching obligations. These demands in practice mean that the pressures to balance teaching and research duties render cultivating links between the two activities a less-than-intuitive process. The author describes the difficulties faced by academics in the…

All teacher preparation programs face serious challenges; however, programs that prepare teachers to work with students with extensive support needs face additional, unique challenges in preparing professionals to facilitate their students' development of functional skills and to ensure their access to the general education curriculum. The purpose…

In this article, the author shares his experiences as one of few Philosophy of Education Society of Australasia (PESA) members and describes how he came to know about PESA. The author recounts an event during his period as president of PESA in 1986 and his efforts to promote and establish some form of international membership of various philosophy…

Ludwig Wittgenstein taught only a couple of Australian philosophers, at Cambridge in the late 1940s, and one of them, Frank "Camo" Jackson (Chair, Philosophy, Monash University) taught the author epistemology and philosophical psychology in the 1970s. In this article, the author describes how this teaching was central to his subsequent…

Issues of assessment design and implementation in Kuwait and the United Arab Emirates (UAE) have attracted some attention over recent years, but teachers' philosophies about assessment remain underexplored. This article reports the findings of a qualitative study into the assessment roles and philosophies of a group of teachers of English as a…

Intentional, systemic philosophical change on an educational program level and on an individual level is often a slow and cyclic process. In this article, we reflect on the journey of philosophical change and growth from a traditional philosophy to an inquiry-based, Reggio-inspired one that occurred on both levels in an early childhood teacher…

School choice is most often viewed through the lens of provision: most of the debate on the issue searches for desirable ways to offer vouchers, scholarships or other tools that provides choice as a way to achieve equality and/or freedom. This paper focuses on the consumer side of school choice, and utilises behavioural economics as well as…

The purpose of this paper is to consider the continued saliency of the ideas of Harold O. Rugg, particularly for social studies education. Given the conservative political times in which we work, and the current educational emphases on academic standards, high-stakes standardized testing, and mastery of specified knowledge, and the impact of these…

As debate continues around the nature and values of education, it is important to ask the question of what factors motivate a student to engage with the ends of an educational institution. In this paper, a broad, holistic view of learner motivation, derived from Aristotelian ethics, is used to provide a model to drive institutional change.…

This paper describes and reflects on the development of the Schome Park Programme (SPP), which was established with the specific aim of extending our thinking about schome, which aims to be the optimal educational system for the 21st century. In an earlier stage of the Schome Initiative, it became clear that people find it almost impossible to…

This article examines metaphors about language teachers created by a group of 23 Malaysian university students. The aims of the study are (1) to determine whether metaphors produced by language learners in the Asian educational context can fit into the four philosophical perspectives on education outlined by Oxford et al. (1998), and (2) to…