Recent reflection on the professional knowledge of teachers has been marked by a shift away from more reductive competence and skill-focused models of teaching towards a view of teacher expertise as involving complex context-sensitive deliberation and judgement. Much of this shift has been inspired by an Aristotelian conception of practical wisdom…

This article presents a model for teacher education based on an ongoing action research project at a Finnish university. This model draws on the educational theory of Dewey and the pedagogical sensibility of Bakhtin to critically consider the concepts of teacher identity and agency and to highlight the role of community in teacher development. Our…

The UK Coalition Government has recently introduced a number of education policies that aim to reform initial teacher development in England. It has argued that the training of new teachers will be improved by giving greater priority to the development of "key teaching skills". This narrowly practical and overly managerial approach to…

One figure who was transitional between educational philosophy and philosophy of education, and who by his industry and prominence laid the foundation for the London school of analytical philosophers of education, was Louis Arnaud Reid who was appointed at the London Institute of Education to the first UK professorship in the philosophy of…

Professor Roy Harris (2009) criticises me for ignoring freedom of speech in order to focus on "soft" issues, such as game theory, decision theory and chaos theory. In this response, I accept most of his arguments relating to freedom of speech, but argue that, in order to develop better systems of education, we need to pay more attention to the…

In the contemporary literature of educational philosophy and theory, it is almost routinely assumed or claimed that "education" is a "contested" concept: that is, it is held that education is invested--as it were, "all the way down"--with socially constructed interests and values that are liable to diverge in different contexts to the point of…

Why is freedom of speech so seldom raised as an issue in philosophy of education? In assessing this question, it is important to distinguish (i) between a freedom and its exercise, and (ii) between different philosophies of education. Western philosophies of education may be broadly divided into classes derived from theories of knowledge first…

This paper critiques what it sees as a tendency on the part of certain social researchers to engage in moralistic critiques of middle-class parents, especially in relation to the choices and actions of such parents within educational quasi-markets. It proceeds to a linked critique of the influence within education of certain aspects of the work of…

This paper proceeds through four stages. First, it provides an account of the origins and evolution of the concept of educational theory. Second, it uses this historical narrative to show how what we now call "educational theory" is deeply rooted in the foundationalist discourse of late nineteenth and early twentieth century modernity. Third, it…

This article argues for a new theoretical paradigm for the analysis of change in educational institutions that is able to deal with such issues as readiness for change, transformational change and the failure of change strategies. Punctuated equilibrium (Tushman and Romanelli, 1985) is a theory which has wide application. It envisages long-term…

Creativity is a popular but heterogeneous word in educational parlance these days. By looking at a selection of recent discourses that refer to creativity to sustain their positions, the paper suggests that two key themes emerge, both with questionable assumptions. Romantic individualists would return us to a naive bygone age of authentic…

Article analyzed the relationship between philosophy and education in the works of Hegel. (Author/RK)

Article attempted to delineate the varying concepts of teacher training which found expression during the 1830s and 1840s, that is, during the formative period of colleges of education as we know them today. (Author/RK)

Working from Philippe Aries'"Centuries of Childhood," the author argues that nineteenth century demands for the education of children may be reinterpreted as the creation of a means of keeping children in a state of dependence and so maintaining a defense for anxious adults. (Editor)

Examining current opinions of moral education, the author criticizes both the notion that moral education makes explicit the hidden values in an academic curriculum and the view that education can be value-free; concluding that schools already have the only moral educationists they need--teachers. (Author/SJL)