In the so-called digital culture, there is a constant presence of radical transformations on the cognitive and affective dimensions of the relations established among teachers and students. Upon this ubiquitous accessibility of information, the very historical and hierarchically verticalized relation between teachers and students has been…

This diffractive disruption of care in early years settings and pedagogies opens up to a provocation that perhaps we don't know care at all. Driven by Puig de la Bellacasa's questioning of the notion of care as not solely a human-only matter and applying that in relation to the early years, it explores what it might mean when we cannot know all…

This article describes our study exploring Extension agents' philosophies of adult education and their perceptions of the role of Cooperative Extension for individuals and in the community. We surveyed agents in Arkansas using the Philosophy of Adult Education Inventory and open-ended questions related to the role of Extension. Most agents…

The article is a reflection on the author's experience teaching a Master's seminar in Philosophical Debates in Environmental Education. It frames the attachment to transformative environmental education as a form of cruel optimism, in the sense proposed by Lauren Berlant. Instead of continuing to foster an optimistic attachment to environmental…

Philosophy is sometimes thought of as having two principal dimensions: one that aims to build systems and doctrines, and another that is concerned to unsettle fixed ways of thinking. Richard Peters seems to position himself in both camps. I suggest that education in the UK today increasingly bears the marks of rigid thinking, largely as a result…

Arising from the question 'How might we think of pedagogy in early childhood education?', this article traces pedagogy's histories, conceptual difficulties, inherent foreclosures, and contextual particularities. It argues that within the context of early education, pedagogy has become an obscure, sophisticated supplement of some sort rather than…

Gert Biesta criticises deliberative models of democracy and education for being based on an understanding of democracy as a 'normal' order, which involves certain 'entry conditions' for democratic participation. As an alternative, Biesta introduces the idea of democracy as 'disruption' and the associated subjectification conception of education…

In this intellectual history, the author traces the refashioning, fall, and re-emergence of the reception of Dewey's work between 1960 and 1988 by student-centred radicals, de-schooling advocates, neo-Marxists, critical educators, and feminist pedagogues--scholars collectively known as the New Left. New Left scholars rejected the assimilationist,…

In previous publications, Gert Biesta has suggested that education should be oriented toward three domains of purpose that he calls "qualification," "socialization," and "subjectification." Many educators, policymakers, and scholars have found this suggestion helpful. Nonetheless, the discussion about the exact nature…

Michael Hand argues in his article 'Against autonomy as an educational aim' that the project of erecting autonomy as an educational aim is wrongheaded. I argue that his argument fails. I discuss two lines of his argument that deal with different senses of autonomy. The first line of argument trades on an ambiguity. As soon as we disambiguate, we…

The authors consider in this critical paper that claims that human agents experience things-in-the-world as the same are deeply flawed as these accounts misconstrue and fail to appreciate the phenomenology of embodied subjectivity. To overcome these complex problems they outline how phenomenology can reach beyond positivist and standardised…

Relating my experience of becoming a 'foreign' comparativist, I offer a vision of comparative education that both extends and challenges the field. It continues the work of Bereday and Lauwerys who sought to make visible the 'contrasting colours of the world' in order to affect deep self-reflection and imagine alternatives. But it also challenges…

The use of photography representing human distress in higher education warrants moral attention, owing to the imperative that we avoid objectifying the vulnerable communities who are often represented in those images. Assuming the fundamental Kantian precept that we should always treat others as ends and never merely as means, I extend this…

In the US and elsewhere, creationist groups have challenged the mandatory science curriculum because it introduces the theory of evolution as the true story of biodiversity. This paper disaggregates this challenge in two distinctive levels. On the substantive level, creationists claim that Darwinian evolution is not value-neutral, as most…

The central aim of this paper is to explore a kind of rationality that seeks to do justice to educational practice: to our understanding of its complexities and to its actual conduct. The enquiry begins with a review of the limits of standardising procedures, including their inbuilt technicist bias, which are increasingly dominant in educational…