Since public schooling was introduced in the nineteenth century, teachers in many western countries have endeavoured to achieve professional recognition. For a short period in the latter part of the twentieth century, professionalism was seen as a discourse of resistance or the "enemy" of economic rationalism and performativity. However,…

Agamben's notion of the "paradigm" has far-reaching implications for educational thinking, curriculum design and pedagogical conduct. In his approach, examples--or paradigms--deeply engage our powers of analogy, enabling us to discern previously unseen affinities among singular objects by stepping outside established systems of…

Colleges and universities exist within a political arena where external demands for accountability materialize within a market-driven environment. As a result, government agencies pressure colleges and universities to rely on assessment and transparent reporting to become more market-driven assuming that the competition within the market, led by…

There is a new myth of the heterogeneous that is reducing the concept of humanity to a sinful enlightenment. In this article I investigate the contribution that a renewed understanding of liberal arts education might offer for the idea of a humanist education and for the concept of humanity; and this at a time when not only the concept of humanity…

The central thesis of this article is that the notion of second nature that John McDowell has reanimated has something of ethical and educational importance, thereby possibly extending the borders of the philosophy of education. The argument to this conclusion is the subject of serious consideration and criticism. The aim of this article is…

In this article we use a hybrid methodology to better understand the skilful performance of sports teams as an exemplar of distributed cognition. We highlight key differences between a team of individual experts (an aggregate system) and an expert team (an emergent system), and outline the kinds of shared characteristics likely to be found in an…

Yoga is a unique form of expert movement that promotes an increasingly subtle interpenetration of thought and movement. The mindful nature of its practice, even at expert levels, challenges the idea that thought and mind are inevitably disruptive to absorbed coping. Building on parallel phenomenological and ethnographic studies of skilful…

In this study I suggest ways of thinking through issues of intimacy that have emerged in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries in the USA. I propose a state of intimaphobia in education. However, I move beyond exposing this state of intimaphobia to offer particular readings of two philosophers of intimacy: Michel Foucault and the…

The intention of the study was to identify predictable opportunities for teachers to scaffold middle year students' philosophical learning. Such opportunities were identified in terms of students' readiness to learn certain behaviours in the context of a "community of inquiry". Thus it was hoped that the project would provide a…

The prominence given in national or state-wide curriculum policy to thinking, the development of democratic dispositions and preparation for the "good life", usually articulated in terms of lifelong learning and fulfilment of personal life goals, gives rise to the current spate of interest in the role that could be played by philosophy…

Participation in service-learning courses has always been considered a part of the informal education in tertiary education worldwide. Originating from the assumption that service-learning courses increase students' civic engagement and bridge the gap between knowledge and practice, service-learning courses have gradually acquired the status…

This study was conducted to address the concept of higher education curricula and its practice from an ecological perspective. First, the significance of ecology is investigated based on two streams of thought; the ecological concept of the university proposed by Ronald Barnett; and the text, "The Three Ecologies" authored by the Italian…

It is sometimes said that we are strangers to ourselves, bearers of internal alterity, as well as to each other. The profounder this strangeness then the greater the difficulty of giving any systematic account of it without paradox: of supposing that our obscurity to ourselves can readily be illuminated. To attempt such an account, in defiance of…

Many science teachers are presented with the challenge of characterizing science as a dynamic, human endeavour. Perspectivism, as a hermeneutic philosophy of science, has the potential to be a learning tool for teachers as they elucidate the complex nature of science. Developed earlier by Nietzsche and others, perspectivism has recently re-emerged…

Critical pedagogy speaks of teachers as liberating and transformative intellectuals. Yet their voice is absent from its discourse.The emancipatory action research, described in this article, created a dialogue between teachers and the ideas concerning oppression and liberation found in Neo-Marxist pedagogies. It strongly suggests that teachers can…