University initiation rituals have long been a source of international concern. However, few English language accounts about such rituals in Southeast Asia are available, and fewer still consider the roles that teaching staff might play. This article investigates a "rab nong" ceremony in Thailand, arguing that initiation rituals have…

Opening Day photographs appeared in Iran's newspapers celebrating the succession of outdoor Nature Schools commencing each year from 2014. Using a narrative photographic approach, this qualitative study collected and analysed newspaper pictures for Iran's Nature Schools in the half decade to 2017. At this time, government approval reflected…

This essay reflects on the longer-term challenges posed to societal, political and educational sectors following the imposition of a shutdown of schools and universities by many governments around the world in response to the COVID-19 pandemic of 2020. Using Rene Girard's analysis of festivals as concealing originary violence, it reflects on the…

Indigenous metissage weaves together life writing, poems, scholarship, and images, as a way of sharing strands of my experience of how, while not innovative to us, Indigenous research methods and transformative, participatory pedagogies, such as dreaming, ceremony, making, and drumming, offer suggestions around ways in which to create communities…

How do people acquire modesty? A simple answer is: if people see that modesty is a worthy trait, they will incorporate it into their character. However, sometimes the knowledge that one is modest would undermine one's modesty. So, Driver claims that the modest person must not know his merits. If we are to accept Driver's claim, it would be…

This article reflects on critical literacies and advances on the idea of performative literacies concerning non-schooled writing practices. Critical literacy posits that beyond literate-school practices there are alternatives to reading and writing. These include semiotic, multimodal, ritual and corporal elements that show knowledge of reality and…

This paper presents a study which was done to investigate schoolteachers' discourse on morality. The teachers used three dimensions to construct and present their discourse on morality: food, religion and relationship. These teachers were drawn from different types of private and public schools in Delhi, the capital of India. The teachers…

United Methodist Church polity bars "self-avowed practicing homosexuals" from ordination and prohibits same-sex wedding celebrations in their churches or by their clergy. Recently, the consequences for disobeying church polity have increased in severity and the denomination is expected to split. This paper profiles three churches who…

Funeral and mourning rites capture so many aspects of the Iranian traditional and religious rituals and provide members of society with cultural tools of lamenting the dead. The study presents socio-cultural considerations in connection with social space and action, linguistic interactions, and semiotic resources of rituals used in mourning…

Each November, commemoration of the First World War armistice (and subsequent military events and conflicts) is almost ubiquitous in UK schools and has been given increased importance during the centenary years of the First World War. Yet as seemingly isolated occasions outside the regular curriculum, school practices of remembrance, and the…

The article begins with an introduction to my digital archival project, the deconstructive approach in it, and the questions that are guiding both the project and the article. Then, I present the ethical dilemmas I encountered after I decided to build a digital archive. I connect these dilemmas with the--witting or otherwise--orientalist pattern…

Carita Pantun, which is one of the oldest literatures in West Java, has now been integrated into Sundanese Local Content learning in secondary schools. However, the existence of this oral tradition is very rare, both in entertainment and ritual events. The inheritance of carita pantun that are not so enthusiastic is the most serious problem. As a…

The article summarizes a study that examined the perspective of kindergarten children on Holocaust Remembrance Day as expressed in the discourse events of children with kindergarten teachers and early childhood education students during Holocaust Day in state kindergartens in Israel in a variety of localities. The article focuses on the…

Modern philosophy have categorized the enlightened human as the exclusive holder of reason. The modern notion of learning established an unbridgeable gap between human ways of learning and those of "non-humans." We assume that learning is a skill of all organisms and not an exclusively human prerogative. We prefer the…

"Tedhak siten" is a Javanese traditional ceremony that marks the 8th month of the baby's age, marked by the baby's readiness to set foot on the ground. This tradition has a philosophical meaning with Javanese cultural values related to the concepts of calculating the ceremony time and the geometric shape of the ceremonial equipment used.…