The implementation of education programmes in different cultures invites the question whether we are justified in doing so in cultures that may reject the programmes' underlying principles. Are there indeed ethical principles and educational ideals that can be justified as applicable to all cultures? After a consideration of Zygmunt Bauman's…

This article draws on Foucault's concept of governmentality to explore how recent political moves to legalise "flexibility" mobilises education authorities to make "community" a technical means of achieving the political objective of schooling the child. I argue that "flexibility" in this sense is a neo-liberal strategy that shifts relations…

A common complaint among those involved in teaching the educational foundations is the reluctance of many trainee teachers to engage in issues of educational theory. This is particularly apparent with those trainees who are more concerned with managing classrooms of children than grappling with what are often abstract and difficult ideas. This…

This paper explores how educators might intervene in canonized texts of the human subject on which a particular and exclusive kind of humanism rests. In imagining possible interventions educators might make, I turn to and trace Jacques Derrida's on-going deconstruction of the philosophical texts of subjectivity. In his body of work, Derrida…

In higher education, the conventional design of educational programs emphasises imparting knowledge and skills, in line with traditional Western epistemology. This emphasis is particularly evident in the design and implementation of many undergraduate programs in which bodies of knowledge and skills are decontextualised from the practices to which…

This paper seeks to explain learning by examining five theories of learning--conceptual analysis, behavioural, constructivist, computational and connectionist. The first two are found wanting and rejected. Piaget's constructivist theory offers a general explanatory framework (assimilation and accommodation) but fails to provide an adequate account…

Over the last two decades the traditional conception of intelligence and other mental powers as stable individual assets has been challenged by approaches in psychology emphasising context and "situated cognition". This paper argues that the debate should not be seen as an empirical dispute, and relates it to discussions in philosophy of mind…

The aim of this paper is to examine the current state of development of Maori science curriculum policy, and the roles that various discourses have played in shaping these developments. These discussions provide a background for suggestions about a possible future direction, and the presentation of a new concept for Maori science education (note…

The idea of "the university" has stood for universal themes--of knowing, of truthfulness, of learning, of human development, and of critical reason. Through its affirming and sustaining of such themes, the university came itself to stand for universality in at least two senses: the university was neither partial (in its truth criteria) nor local…

In this paper I propose a contrast between learning as the acquisition of theories and learning as the development of insight. I then suggest that, in a great many cases, the cognitive achievement by which we come to organise behaviour rationally is the development of insight, where this is independent of the acquisition of knowledge regimented in…

Critical educational research offers the researcher a position and an ethos of comfort. Even the declared recognition of the relativity of principles, norms or criteria so characteristic of much critical research does not prevent it from looking immediately for a way out of this uncomfortable situation i.e. to keep to the idea that comfort (for…

Following the first significant research into Indigenous methods of learning, it was argued that Indigenous students could learn western knowledge using Indigenous ways of learning. Subsequent research contradicted this finding to take the position that Indigenous students must learn western knowledge using western methods and so this set the…

This paper offers an introduction to the philosophy and science of embodied learning, conceived as both the stabilizing and expansionary process that sustains order and novelty within learners' worlds enacted through observing and describing. Embodied learning acknowledges stability and change as the purposeful conjoined characteristics that…

The Dreyfus (2001) account of seven stages of learning is considered in the context of the Dreyfus (1980s) account of five stages of skill development. The two new stages, Mastery and Practical Wisdom, make more explicit certain themes implicit in the five-stage account. In this way Dreyfus (2001) encourages a more reflexive approach. The themes…

This article offers a way to salvage the ideal of the autonomous person from the predicament besetting it and to reclaim it as a worthy and respectable ideal. Carefully maneuvering around this ideal, jettisoning its obsolete qualities while reaffirming its sound ones, the authors offer outlines for a conception of personal autonomy suitable for…