This volume centres the notion of "chance" in education as a key concept in contemporary education – relating to aspects like accountability, datafication, or international large-scale assessments – and discusses the impact that the historical desire to "tame" this notion has had on present-day educational policy and practice. Encouraging readers to widen their educational imagination, chapters combine secondary research from the fields of cybernetics, systems thinking, and comparative education with issues of control, prediction, and comparison as ways to tame chance in education. Using the theoretical lenses of reasoning, notions, and addendums for legitimacy to foster a critical awareness of rarely discussed educational matters, the book explores how these notions are central to the taming of chance within education. Ultimately, the authors determine the styles of reasoning that are foundational and frame how we think about, and act on, education, and thereby address one of the top priorities in educational policy, politics, and practice today. This timely book, with its unique perspective on the debates around education, will be of interest to students, researchers, and scholars in the fields of education policy and politics, international and comparative education, and theory of education. Those involved with the philosophy of education will also find the book valuable.

The contributions in this book all concern the Building Block Approach to the study of religions as proposed and explored by Professor Ann Taves (University of California, Santa Barbara) during the last 30 years. This approach suggests that analysis of and explanations for complex cultural phenomena such as religion should entail dividing these phenomena into "the constituent parts that interact to produce them", in terms of basic cognitive, psychological and biological proc-esses. In this way, the approach opens up a path to achieving consil-ience between the humanistic, behavioural and natural sciences. The book provides a short and user-friendly introduction to the Building Block Approach suitable for use in the undergraduate classroom as well as by graduate and more advanced scholars. The book opens with a lengthy introduction by Ann Taves and Egil Asprem (Stockholm University, Sweden) outlining the Building Block Approach and its rele-vance for the study of religions. The introduction is followed by seven responses, comments and critiques that identify pros and cons of the approach from different perspectives and areas of study within the larger field of the study of religions. In the concluding chapter, Taves and Asprem provide their responses to the comments and critiques raised.

The contributions in this book all concern the Building Block Approach to the study of religions as proposed and explored by Professor Ann Taves (University of California, Santa Barbara) during the last 30 years. This approach suggests that analysis of and explanations for complex cultural phenomena such as religion should entail dividing these phenomena into “the constituent parts that interact to produce them”, in terms of basic cognitive, psychological and biological proc-esses. In this way, the approach opens up a path to achieving consil-ience between the humanistic, behavioural and natural sciences. The book provides a short and user-friendly introduction to the Building Block Approach suitable for use in the undergraduate classroom as well as by graduate and more advanced scholars. The book opens with a lengthy introduction by Ann Taves and Egil Asprem (Stockholm University, Sweden) outlining the Building Block Approach and its rele-vance for the study of religions. The introduction is followed by seven responses, comments and critiques that identify pros and cons of the approach from different perspectives and areas of study within the larger field of the study of religions. In the concluding chapter, Taves and Asprem provide their responses to the comments and critiques raised.