Authentic assessment has been proposed as having potential to enhance student learning for a changing world. Conventionally, assessment is seen to be authentic when the tasks are real-to-life or have real-life value. Drawing on Martin Heidegger's work, we challenge this conceptualisation as narrow and limited. We argue that authenticity need…

With the tertiary education mantra of creativity, critical thinking and innovation in mind, we consider the critical-creativity of error. Taking the university to model social orthography, or "correct writing", according to the norms of disciplines, we consider the role of error in the classroom. Looked at another way, error questions…

Chris Peers begins his response to Jim Mackenzie's article, "Peers on Socrates and Plato" by asking "What is the 'masculine imaginary?'" Peers defines the term "imaginary" as it is applied in his article, "Freud, Plato and Irigaray: A Morpho-Logic of Teaching and Learning" (2012) and draws…

Early intervention comes in-between the lives of children, families and teachers. This article uses part of a report written by an educational psychologist about a little girl to question the nature of intervention through Rancière's writings. As children and parents are seen as put into the position of inadequacy, they require such…

In a recent keynote speech Paul Standish noted "there is agreement in judgments. But how the response to those judgments is realised is always cultural" (paper presented to PESA Conference, Taiwan, 2012, p. 2). Making judgments about what constitutes "crisis" for children is not necessarily agreed universally, though clearly…

Under models of moral and global citizenship education, compassion and caring are emphasized as a counterpoint to pervasive, heartless, neo-liberal globalization. According to such views, these and related emotions such as empathy, sympathy, and pity, can cause people to act righteously to aid others who are disadvantaged through no fault of their…

A combination of policy changes and wider socio-economic trends led to a dramatic increase in child poverty in New Zealand during the late 1980s and early 1990s. Higher rates of child poverty have now become embedded in the system and show little sign of resolving themselves. For a country which once took pride in being comparatively egalitarian…

Recent social policy discourses in Aotearoa New Zealand focus on vulnerable children's well-being and the detrimental, long-term and costly impacts of child poverty. The discourse pervading much of the policy labels children and young people as "vulnerable" or "at risk" or "in crisis", a view, which we argue, is…

In this article, Nesta Devine responds to Jonathan Boston's article "Child Poverty in New Zealand: Why It Matters and How It Can Be Reduced" ("Educational Philosophy and Theory," v46 n9 p995-999, 2014). Devine wishes to consider Boston's position from two angles: one is to rehearse the point that these statistics are…

The purpose of this paper is to respond to Jonathan Boston's article, which outlined the findings of the Expert Advisory Group (2012), in which he singled out one policy change, the 1991 budget cuts to benefit levels, as being the major cause of one-quarter of New Zealand's children now living below the poverty line. In her response, Liz…

Jonathan Boston provides an insightful analysis of the emergence and persistence of child poverty in New Zealand (Boston, 2014, "Educational Philosophy and Theory"). His remarks on why child poverty matters are brief but, as he reports, "there is a large and robust body of research on the harmful consequences of child poverty"…

What do we mean when we say we want to put children at the centre of policy? What are the moral justifications for this approach? Has it become harder for us to understand this concept, when in practice paid work has been at the centre? In part confusion arises because the unpaid work of caring for children is invisible until it is marketized. In…

A major challenge for education policymakers and educators globally is the strong and persistent impact of student socio-economic status (SES) on learning. This is a challenge that will not be addressed solely by school-focused reform. However, one policy initiative that could make a positive difference in this regard, and could bring other…

This article highlights the lack of human rights recognition for arguably one of the most vulnerable groups in our society, children and young people in the care of the state. Currently under New Zealand legislation and policy frameworks these children do not have their rights upheld, as per New Zealand's obligations under the United Nations…

The purpose of this article is to make a case for "The Rebel" as an important educational text. Discussing "The Rebel" in this way for the first time, the goal is to try and demonstrate that the work could have a unique contribution; in particular there might be a number of similarities between Camus and educational thinkers…