The idea of a sign language town, or a Deaf utopia, where Deaf and signing people can come together to live in a geographical or figurative homeland has long persisted in US Deaf life, letters, and literature. In the wake of the Milan Congress of 1880, Alexander Graham Bell's alarming rhetoric concerning "a deaf mute variety of the human…

Autobiographical theatre usually brings to the forefront personal experiences that have been hidden or silenced, while the autoethnographic approach emphasises their social dimensions. This article looks at "Night Watchers" (an autobiographical/autoethnographic piece) featuring three artists who, using acting, painting, and poetry, tell…

The kindergarten teachers of the Religious Kibbutz movement (RK) as a unique group are connected both to the educational approaches of the kindergartens in the general Kibbutz Movement and the state religious kindergartens. A qualitative study included semi-structured interviews with 15 RK kindergarten teachers in order to explore their…

The Camphill Movement is one of the largest independent providers of social care for people with a learning disability: there are 119 communities located throughout the world. From the start, the principal aim of the Movement--co-founded by Dr. Karl König and his wife Tilla (née Maasberg) in Aberdeen--was to build communities in which children and…

In this article I aim to establish a relevant connection between John Dewey's educational philosophy and the hippie communes of the United States during the nineteen sixties and seventies. After an assessment of Dewey's philosophy against the background of the countercultural sixties, I summarize and organize Dewey's philosophical thought around…

As experiments and models of participatory, sustainable living, ecovillages demonstrate how to enact just, cooperative, and regenerative economic and social constructs, as alternatives to 'unsustainable' capitalist economies and consumerist/individualistic lifestyles. Work is central to these enactments, which provides an opportunity to examine…

This article explores learning processes that underpin ecovillages as place based 'sustainability initiatives'. Through the theoretical lens of place- based transformative learning (PBTL), developed in earlier work (Pisters et al., 2019, 2020), empirical data from life-story interviews and photovoice sessions from three ecovillages is analysed and…

This paper aims to present two potential instruments that will address the lack of knowledge in regard to the context of students' reality from teaching professionals in a specific school, these being: a local historiography (record of "yesterday"), based on oral history; and a reality inventory (record of "today"), elaborated…

In this article, we explore the concept of African communitarianism and reflect on its potential value for ecojustice education as a localised response to the wider ecological crises that impacts on African communities. We argue for an African eco-communitarian perspective and propose that this perspective extends ecojustice education. Such…

Bedouin early childhood education lacks substantial resources and budgets, and so the adjacent Jewish education seems more appealing. Given the existing tensions between Arabs and Jews and the need to change the obscure future of co-existence, this paper examines the integration of Bedouin children into the early childhood education of a kibbutz,…

This study explores the impact of residential environment (urban vs. kibbutz community) and use of information and communication technology (ICT) on loneliness among the elderly in Israel. The quantitative study surveys four sub-populations of people above the age of 65: (a) kibbutz residents who use ICT, (b) kibbutz residents who do not use ICT,…

Modern historical research challenges religious education by undermining the arguments in favour of the existence of a supreme power who is responsible for patterns of reality. This article explores how the new generation of history textbooks of Religious Zionism, one of Israel's ideologically most influential populations, cope with this dilemma.…

This paper focuses on the "Junkyard" ("chatzar grutaot")--a unique educational environment and practice developed in kindergartens on the Israeli kibbutz in the 1940s and 1950s, and still in wide use today in kibbutz kindergartens. The Junkyard, consisting of artefacts of the adult world that are no longer in use, is an…

"Life reform" is an umbrella term used for describing the movements critical of modernisation whose main features were the desire to return to nature and naturalness, to self-healing and finding lost integrity again. They also have close ties to the educational reforms of the time. These movements were particularly active in the German,…

The security risks posed by the Anthropocene requires peace education strategies aimed at developing the skills necessary for the emergence of regenerative social forms, based on sustainable synergies between humans and nature. This article explores how community-building and regenerative ecology frameworks developed in ecovillages can contribute…