In this paper, Christian Morgner provides a critical reading of Niklas Luhmann's thinking as ignoring human beings or even as antihumanist. Here, he presents an alternative view that centers on Luhmann's idea of the child or human being as a medium. To explain Luhmann's use of these ideas to conceptualize the child and the consequences for…

Human beings are spending less time in nature than previous generations. Without opportunities to interact with nature, we are unable to forge deeper connections with the natural world, leading to indifference and unwillingness to protect it. At the same time, climate change has led to biodiversity loss and new threats such as pandemics, making…

The COVID-19 crisis made spaces for people to immerse themselves in moments of reflection. The suspension of time, sites, and body mobility, the collapse of the past principles; as the macro learning environment has undergone unprecedented changes, how could people read and react to those changes? Learning at the university, almost all the…

This article considers the value of physical literacy. Unequivocal support for aspects of the concept can be found in philosophy, neuroscience, social justice, the nature of human development, psychology, and sociocultural studies. These areas of support will be outlined and then related to the practical value of physical literacy in the school…

Competency is a central concept for human resource management, training and education. We define a competency as the capacity of a person to display a generic skill with a certain level of performance when applied to one or more knowledge entities. Competencies, and competency referentials grouping competencies, are essential elements for user…

Using Deleuzian theory for educational research and practice has become an increasingly popular activity (e.g., Cole 2011). However, there are many theoretical complexities to the straightforward application of Deleuze to the educational context. For example, the 'new materialism' that Deleuze refers to in the 1960s takes its inspiration from…

The aim of this paper is to challenge the physical and conceptual boundaries of educational places and spaces with the use of metaphor: the story of Professor Kirke's magic wardrobe in "The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe," the first book in The Chronicles of Narnia by CS Lewis (1950). By explicating and theorising the concerns that…

This article engages critically with Bourdieu's notion of field. It questions the emphasis that Bourdieu places on what he terms 'objective relations' at the expense of the actual relations of those within a field. This not only involves relations between human actors but the interactions of humans with the non-human such as inanimate objects that…

In this review essay, Mark Brenneman and Frank Margonis address three recent book-length contributions to the ongoing discussion around cosmopolitanism and educational thought: Mark Olssen's "Liberalism, Neoliberalism, Social Democracy: Thin Communitarian Perspectives on Political Philosophy and Education," Sharon Todd's "Toward an Imperfect…

The aim of the "National Academy of Education (NAEd) Educating for Civic Reasoning and Discourse" report is to better prepare students to examine and discuss complex civic, political, and social issues by ensuring that the curricula, pedagogy, and learning environments that they experience are informed by the best available evidence and…

This paper explores Paulo Freire's philosophy of hope. This is significant because, for Freire, it was human hope that rendered education possible, necessary and necessarily political. Like other areas of his thought, however, his reading of hope contained ambiguities and contradictions, and the paper explores these by locating Freire's thought in…

The authors consider in this critical paper that claims that human agents experience things-in-the-world as the same are deeply flawed as these accounts misconstrue and fail to appreciate the phenomenology of embodied subjectivity. To overcome these complex problems they outline how phenomenology can reach beyond positivist and standardised…

Nel Noddings claims that there is an important normative element in happiness. For support, she points to the Aristotelian idea of the "eudaimonic" life, a concept that is often translated into English as "the happy life". However, in light of the wide divergence between the Aristotelian view of "eudaimonia" as a life…

This article explores and extends Levinas's ideas of singularity and community as multiplicity and argues that his identification of language and discourse as the means to create ethical communities provides tangible possibilities for rebuilding genuine democracy in a humane world. These ideas help us reimagine school and classroom as communities…

In this essay Gregory Bynum seeks to show that Immanuel Kant's thought, which was conceived in an eighteenth-century context of new, and newly widespread, pressures for nationally institutionalized human rights-based regimes (the American and French revolutions being the most prominent examples), can help us think in new and appreciative ways…