This book critically examines multiple discourses of wellbeing in relation to the composite aims of schooling. Drawing from a Scottish study, the book disentangles the discursive complexity, to better understand what can happen in the name of wellbeing, and in particular, how wellbeing is linked to learning in schools. Arguing that educational discourses have been overshadowed by discourses of other groups, the book examines the political and ideological policy aims that can be supported by different discourses of wellbeing. It also uses interview data to show how teachers and policy actors accepted, or re-shaped and remodelled the policy discourses as they made sense of them in their own work. When addressing schools' responses to inequalities, discussions are often framed in terms of wellbeing. Yet wellbeing as a concept is poorly defined and differently understood across academic and professional disciplines such as philosophy, psychology, health promotion, and social care. Nonetheless, its universally positive connotations allow policy changes to be ushered in, unchallenged. Powerful actions can be exerted through the use of soft vocabulary as the discourse of wellbeing legitimates schools' intervention into personal aspects of children's lives. As educators worldwide struggle over the meaning and purpose of schooling, discourses of wellbeing can be mobilised in support of different agendas. This book demonstrates how this holds both dangers and opportunities for equality in education. Amartya Sen's Capability Approach is used to offer a way forward in which different understandings of wellbeing can be drawn together to offer a perspective that enhances young people's freedoms in education and their freedoms gained through education.

This far-sighted volume describes emerging trends and challenges in university-level social sciences education in an era marked by globalization, austerity, and inequity. It spotlights solution-focused and interdisciplinary methods of teaching, developed to match influential academic ideas, such as self-directed learning and learning in communities, as students seek to engage with and improve conditions in their immediate environments. Chapters offer real-world applications of foundational concepts in the modern practice of teaching, learning, and curriculum development. Accordingly, the editors emphasize the relationship between pedagogy and curriculum, as both are critical in encouraging student autonomyand promoting optimum academic and societal outcomes. Included in the coverage: * Towards a concept of solution-focused teaching: learning in communities. * Heutagogy and the emerging curriculum. * Collaborative working in the statutory and voluntary sectors. * Delivering a community development curriculum to students with multiple identities. * Photography and teaching in community development. * A model for change: sharing ideas and strategies. The Pedagogy of the Social Sciences Curriculum will inspire sociologists, social workers, and health and sociology educators to take a deeper role in community well-being as students, faculty, and communities collaborate to make lasting contributions to society.

There are, despite the loneliness of our classrooms and the heartache of having been called to teach, others on the path with us. Teaching is hard. Teaching in a Montessori path is even more so. Montessorians are asked to give up so much of ourselves, to make ourselves humble and lowly before the child, to be servants, to be scientists, to be saints. We often let ourselves down. There it is, then. We will let ourselves down. But there are others on the path with us. We can lean on each other. We can walk in each other's footsteps. Sometimes we're at the front of the path. Sometimes we're following another traveler. Sometimes we're resting. Sometimes the laughter of our group is so cacophonous that we forget how tired our feet are. Sometimes we're so far ahead or behind that we can't even see each other anymore. But we're not alone.

We are each other's navigational stars. Montessori's words, across generations, guide us. Our own words, whispered in each other's ears or passed in notes or published in books, they give us guidance, too. They remind us on the hardest days that we're not alone. We are not alone. We share certain tendencies, certain traits, common among humanity, common across decades. We are working in common toward a perfection we may never individually see. But we're on the path. And we're not alone.

These papers aim to provide a substantial review of the literature pertaining to a comprehensive range of traditional and contemporary research paradigms and research methods. The book is designed as a reference work for novice researchers in the fields of geographical and environmental education.

Researchers agree that schools construct a "particular" image of science, in which some characteristics are featured while others end up in oblivion. The result is that although most children are likely to be familiar with images of heroic scientists such as Einstein and Darwin, they rarely learn about the messy, day-to-day practice of science in which scientists are ordinary humans. Surprisingly, the process by which this imagination of science in education occurs has rarely been theorized. This is all the more remarkable since great thinkers tend to agree that the formation of images imagination is at the root of how human beings modify their material world. Hence this process in school science is fundamental to the way in which scientists, being the successful agents in/of science education, actually create their own scientific enterprise once they take up their professional life.

One of the first to examine the topic, this book takes a theoretical approach to understanding the process of imagining science in education. The authors utilize a number of interpretive studies in both science and science education to describe and contrast two opposing forces in the imagination of science in education: epicization and novelization. Currently, they argue, the imagination of science in education is dominated by epicization, which provides an absolute past of scientific heroes and peak discoveries. This opens a distance between students and today s scientific enterprises, and contrasts sharply with the wider aim of science education to bring the actual world of science closer to students.

To better understand how to reach this aim, the authors offer a detailed look at novelization, which is a continuous renewal of narratives that derives from dialogical interaction. The book brings together two hitherto separate fields of research in science education: psychologically informed research on students images of science and semiotically informed research on images of science in textbooks. Drawing on a series of studies in which children participate in the imagination of science in and out of the classroom, the authors show how the process of novelization actually occurs in the practice of education and outline the various images of science this process ultimately yields."

Taking on the challenge to teaching the "desire-not-to-know" presents, Alcorn examines qualities of student resistance to new and uncomfortable information and proposes methods for teachers and professors to work productively with such resistance. Research in neuroscience, education, sociology, political science, and the humanities has contributed to a revisionary understanding of how emotion grounds human reason, interaction, and communication. Colleges and Universities produce and distribute information but do very little to ensure that information is effectively assimilated and employed as solutions to real problems. This book outlines an agenda that makes emotional experience central to educational practice.

In "Education Policy Research," Helen M. Gunter, David Hall and Colin Mills bring together contributions from a range of researchers, academics and practitioners. Each chapter draws on critical theoretical perspectives and showcases innovative research projects within educational settings to understand the current changes in schools, schooling and education, to explore critical questions. The varied accounts demonstrate the importance of partnerships between schools and higher education, and of putting educational research into context, specifically charting the ways in which schools and schooling have been reformed through government interventions. "Education Policy Research" presents new research findings on the realities of how educational practice can be understood and explained, so enabling researchers to take a reflexive stance towards their own work. The editors and contributors take seriously the need to rethink their data and consider the contribution of research dispositions and practices to ongoing change and development. At the same time, the chapters give recognition to what research and researchers can and cannot do, contributing to the ongoing debates about the value of - and the urgent ongoing need for - social science research.

This collection discusses and illustrates how educational research is affected by the economic, institutional and physical contingencies of its time, and in our time even increasingly is driven by them. It is argued that the antidote to this is, however, not to aspire to 'thought itself', but instead to do justice to its own rootedness in the 'material', including textuality. From an historical point of view such an innovative approach can itself revamp the material scholarly culture and the way it is represented. The chapters address a variety of topics such as the cultural heritage of the school desk, the significance of images for research into long-term educational processes, the way iconic signs function, and how modes of enquiry relate to the materiality of education. Attention is also given to standards for reporting on educational research studies and how these limit the scope and communication and moreover shape researchers, to the forms of citation practices as substantially influencing methods and content, and to the centrality of conversation not just as the means to an end but as what matters; further to representational and to non-representational theories for educational research. Some examples are drawn from the area of arts-based educational research, from mathematics education, and from the discourse on universities.

Higher education has seen better days. Harsh budget cuts, the precarious nature of employment in colleague teaching, and political hostility to the entire enterprise of education have made for an increasingly fraught landscape. Radical Hope is an ambitious response to this state of affairs, at once political and practice - the work of an activist, teacher, and public intellectual grappling with some of the most pressing topics at the intersection of higher education and social justice. Kevin Gannon asks that the contemporary university's manifold problems be approached as opportunities for critical engagement, arguing that, when done effectively, teaching is by definition emancipatory and hopeful. Considering individual pedagogical practice, the students who are the primary audience and beneficiaries of teaching, and the institutions and systems within which teaching occurs, Radical Hope surveys the field, tackling everything from impostor syndrome to cell phones in class to allegations of a campus 'free speech crisis'. Throughout, Gannon translates ideals into tangible strategies and practices (including key takeaways at the conclusion of each chapter), with the goal of reclaiming teachers' essential role in the discourse of higher education.

This book re-theorizes the relationship between pedagogy and play. The authors suggest that pedagogical play is characterized by conceptual reciprocity (a pedagogical approach for supporting children's academic learning through joint play) and agentic imagination (a concept that when present in play, affords the child's motives and imagination a critical role in learning and development). These new concepts are brought to life using a cultural-historical approach to the analysis of play, supported in each chapter by visual narratives used as a research method for re-theorising play as a pedagogical activity. Whenever a cultural-historical approach is applied to understanding pedagogical play, the whole context of the playful event is always included. Further, the child's cultural environment is taken into account in order to better understand their play. Children from different countries play differently for many reasons, which may include their resources, local cultural beliefs about play and specific pedagogical practices. The inclusion and acknowledgement of social, cultural and historical contexts gives credence and value to understanding play from both child and adult perspectives, which the authors believe is important for the child's learning and development. As such, the relationships that children and adults have with human and non-human others, as well as any connections with artefacts and the material environment, are included in all considerations of pedagogical play.

This book provides an overview of the major findings of the comparative research project, Changes in Networks, Higher Education and Knowledge Society (CINHEKS). The main aim of this international comparative research project is the analysis of how Higher education institutions are networked within distinct knowledge societies in two key regions of the world: Europe and the United States of America. This research project was carried out in four European countries (Finland, Germany, Portugal and the United Kingdom) and in two different states in the United States of America. In addition, during the course of the research, a team from the Russian Federation joined the CINHEKS study. The analysis is contextually grounded in a comparative policy analysis focused on the main developments and understandings of the ideas surrounding the term knowledge society, in all countries concerned. Empirical elaboration is established via a series of sequential studies, each building, incrementally, on the previous study. These studies include institutional profiles of higher education institutions, institutional case studies, and an international comparative survey that illuminates academics' social networks. The research findings broaden our understanding of the differences and similarities in how higher education institutions and individual academics are networked within and between societies that understand themselves as knowledge societies. The book introduces a novel analytical synthesis, which asserts contemporary societies have evolved into Networked Knowledge Societies. Methodologically, the book both challenges and raises the bar for previous approaches in comparative higher education, in terms of research design, execution and lays the groundwork for a new generation of international comparative higher education research.

On the occasion of the retirement of Paul Smeyers, this book considers the state and status of the philosophy and history of education today. Over the last 20 years, the conditions in which research takes place have changed considerably. They have done so in ways that are often less than favourable to disciplines such as history and philosophy of education, and the space and time for the practices that constitute these disciplines - of reading, of writing, of collegiality - is increasingly under pressure. During this time, the Research Community on the History and Philosophy of Educational Research has convened annually to bring its critical lenses to bear on these emergent conditions and to suggest ways that educational research might, or ought to, be done otherwise. As co-founder and co-convenor of the Research Community, this volume explores and recounts Paul Smeyers' development of Wittgensteinian scholarship and its legacy in education, his formative role in the development of philosophy of education as an international field, his many international collaborations, the "useless" educational-philosophical deepening of concepts, and the wider educational-philosophical import of this. This gives rise to consideration of the failure of these fields to halt the changes in the governance and status of the university that threatens them, and those practices that remain and that are emerging in academia that we wish to protect, to pass on to the next generation of researchers in these fields.

This book offers a new framework for the analysis of teaching and learning in the creative arts. It provides teachers with a vocabulary to describe what they teach and how they do this within the creative arts. Teaching and learning in this field, with its focus on the personal characteristics of the student and its insistence on intangible qualities like talent and creativity, has long resisted traditional models of pedagogy. In the brave new world of high-stakes assessment and examination-driven outcomes across the education system, this resistance has proven to be a severe weakness and driven creative arts teachers further into the margins. Instead of accepting this relegation teachers of creative arts must set out to capture the distinctiveness of their pedagogy. This book will allow teachers to transcend the opaque metaphors that proliferate in the creative arts, and instead to argue for the robustness and rigour of their practice.

Epistemologies of Ignorance provide educators a distinct epistemological view on questions of marginalization, oppression, relations of power and dominance, difference, philosophy, and even death among our youth. The authors of this edited collection challenge the ambivalence - ignorance - found in the construction of curriculum, teaching practices, research guidelines, and policy mandates in our schools. Further, ignorance is also considered a necessary by-product of knowledge production. In this sense, the authors explore not only issues of complicity but also issues of oppression in spite of educators' liberatory intentions. While this is the first systematic effort to transfer epistemologies of ignorance to the educational scene, this movement has its roots in race, class, gender, and sexuality studies, particularly the work of Charles Mills, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Shannon Sullivan, and Nancy Tuana. It is our unequivocal belief that, while this is transformative and powerful scholarship, the study of ignorance remains understudied and under-theorized in education scholarship, from curriculum studies and cultural foundations to science education and educational psychology. This collection highlights without apology why this dangerous state of affairs cannot continue.

Lasley shows how American culture fosters selfishness, aggression, and violence. He believes that selflessness can and should be taught in the home and in the schools as an antidote to the individualism and tribalism that multicultural diversity can lead to. Without a certain cultural and personal respect for the other, the myriad racial, ethnic, and ideological differences could tear American society apart. Lasley uses ethnological examples of non-Western societies that stress nonviolence to elucidate models of peaceful behavior. He provides ways and means of teaching peaceful principles by using the literature of altruism and the images of service and other-directed activities.

Addressing the need for marshaling the resources of education to help promote a more civil society, this book argues that education has a critical role to play in challenging the dominant views of politics and education. Service learning, or academically based community service,is seen as a promising educational pedagogy that can help students acquire civic virtue and serve as a mechanism to enable institutions of higher education become stronger community partners. However, there is currently is a lack of theoretical grounding for the service-learning movement; consequently,service learning is in danger of being co-opted by academic traditionalism, which could vitiate service learning's social transformative potential and in fact undermine efforts at democratic revitalization. The author provides a basic explanation of service learning and how it is connected to promoting civic virtue. It examines the underlying public philosophy debate between weak and strong democracy theorists, or procedural and civic republicanism. This book argues that certain approaches to service learning, such as the voluntarist or charity model, the experiential education model, and the justice model are ineffective because of their association with weak democracy theory or procedural republicanism. The central argument of this book is that a progressive communitarian public philosophy maintaining that individuals attain meaning and significance in the context of community is the most appropriate grounding for service learning.

The varied chapters of this book seek to capture the complexities of teaching and learning in today's schools, and they share an interest in exploring the influences of knowledge construction in the moment and over time. Teaching and learning are human processes, interrelated and dynamic. We assembled this collection to unpack what it means to teach and to learn, teasing out some of the implications and challenges of such complicated educational processes that are often misconstrued as causal or linear. As educators currently residing in the United States, we find this a particularly pressing agenda, given the current focus on common core standards and reducing teaching and learning to conceptual and pedagogical stepby-step procedures. Our primary concern in putting together this book was to provide a conceptual and political foundation from which to construct and defend understandings and practices of teaching and learning that embody the complexity of educational endeavors and relationships. The isolation of teaching from learning, and the othering of both teachers and students, one from the other, suggests that knowledge is synonymous with information. This book challenges such assumptions. The project underlying this text can be seen as a means of rethinking how teachers' and students' perspectives of practice and curriculum influence what learning opportunities are provided to students. Chapters written by established and new thinkers in the field of education demonstrate the ways in which teachers reformulate relationships between teaching and learning in school settings. Our second objective is to examine local constructions of knowledge over time and how those constructions are consequential for teacher and student learning. By examining patterns of practice and processes of knowledge construction in elementary, secondary, and undergraduate classrooms, the authors of these chapters lay a foundation for examining commonalities and differences in the construction of knowledge and practices across educational levels, disciplines, and in-school and outof-school settings.

Two persistent dilemmas haunt school reform: curriculum politics and classroom constancy. Both undermined the 1960s' new social studies, a dynamic reform movement centered on inquiry, issues, and social activism. Dramatic academic freedom controversies ended reform and led to a conservative restoration. On one side were teachers and curriculum developers; on the other, conservative activists determined to undo the revolutions of the 1960s. The episode brought a return to traditional history, a turn away from questioning, and the re-imposition of authority. Engagingly written and thoroughly researched, "The Tragedy of American School Reform" offers a provocative perspective on current trends.

This book critically examines the socio-cultural role of achievement within education, arguing that the increasingly global demand for measurable standards of academic achievement is an expression of political ideology and the aggressive, competitive reality of a neo-capitalist schooling system. The book explores how this burgeoning demand in education systems contrasts with the very foundations of education and educational common-sense, which should value achievement as a basis for developing a positive sense of worth for all students and for nurturing their potential. Instead, these systems are structured by consumerism, exploitation and marginalization, breeding a social-Darwinian atmosphere within school environments that results in many students feeling socially worthless and as though they have under-achieved.

In this book, an eminent educational historian examines some important aspects of American schooling over the past centuries, illuminating the relation between education and other broad changes in American society and providing a historical perspective for contemporary efforts at school reform. Maris Vinovskis critically reviews and integrates recent work in educational history and provides new research on neglected topics. He discusses such issues as: the gradual shift from the family to the public schools in the responsibility for educating the young; the rise and fall of infant schools between 1840 and 1860; the crisis in the teaching of morality in the public schools of the mid-nineteenth century; early efforts to provide schooling for impoverished children; and the evolution of the belief that education improves individual economic and social mobility. He also studies school attendance and discovers that a much higher percentage of children may have attended public high schools in the nineteenth century than has been assumed, investigates when the practice of placing children in grades according to their age became widespread, and assesses whether different age groups in previous eras varied in their support for schooling-as they seem to be doing now.

This collection indicates how research on teaching and learning from multiple scientific disciplines such as educational science and psychology can be successfully pursued by a co-operation between researchers and school teachers. The contributors adopt different methodological approaches, ranging from field research to laboratory experiments.

Immanuel Wallerstein and Istvan Meszaros are prolific scholars whose analyses of global capitalism in crisis offer distinctive insights for research across the social sciences. This book engages readers with their main theses, encouraging their application in analysis of social reality and of its institutions of mass education, which aim to prepare workers for the global economy. Using the theoretical lenses offered by these two scholars, Tom G. Griffiths and Robert Imre develop a timely and provocative critique of mass education for this century, challenging readers to contribute to the construction of radical alternatives.

Carter illuminates and validates the vital role of visioning in social education. The book features peace in social education with instructional recommendations, planning resources and descriptions of transdisciplinary learning. It elaborates mindful citizenship across social, environmental, ethical, geographic, economic and political realms.