The paper discusses the value of imagination in educational debate and makes an argument for Irish adult educators making space and time to envisage a range of possible futures for the field beyond the terms offered in current policy. It explores this topic in relation to neoliberal educational reform and the broader social context. The second…

This article uses the findings from an empirical study on Hong Kong students' reading practices as collected through face-to-face interviews on major university campuses in Hong Kong to argue for the importance of "affective" and "imaginative" engagement with literary texts if students are to develop an interest in reading.…

In physical education (PE) and sports there is little theoretical and empirical knowledge about transgender people, and particularly, on how they are and can be imagined within this context. In this paper, we present and analyze a pedagogical activity based on the reading and discussion of a fictional representation of a transgender person within…

This paper introduces an approach to teaching ethics as design in a new course entitled Design Ethics, team-taught by a philosopher and an engineer/designer. The course follows a problem-based learning model in which groups of students work through the phases of the design process on a project for a local client, considering the design values and…

The author examines, using educational poetics as form of aesthetic inquiry, pedagogical practices that incorporate a poetics of leadership activity in preparing educational leaders. In particular, the author draws forward John Dewey's philosophical positioning of aesthetic experience. Poetics involves a deepening of understanding and sensitivity…

Students should have aesthetic experiences to be fully engaged in science learning at any level. A general education science instructor can foster opportunities for aesthetic educative learning experiences enabling student growth. Drawing on the work of John Dewey and expanding on others in the field, Uhrmacher identifies the characteristics of…

The rationale for retaining the humanities in universities in the 21st century is not self-evident. A case for the humanities can only be fully made against a sense of their loss or their absence. Some say that we are already in a post-human society, but what role might the humanities play in such a society? Presumably, the fate of the humanities…

Purpose: To address the dynamic challenges associated with developing a globally sustainable society, numerous scholars have stressed the need to cultivate the imagination of agricultural students. This study aimed to explore how pictorial representations stimulate the imaginative capacities of agricultural extension students.…

Study abroad opportunities can contribute significantly to the development of higher education students. However, participants' preparation experiences and future-oriented thought patterns prior to the international mobility period can influence the merits of such opportunities. This study, therefore, explored the preparation experiences of…

The digital economy and the global pandemic, together with the effects of climate change, have taken a human toll affecting the pace of everyday life, creating an exponential increase in anxiety and stress related diseases. Today's complex, globalised world creates a need to challenge and reconceptualise educational priorities. In an increasingly…

For centuries, the titans of educational reform--Plato, Rousseau, Dewey, Piaget, Erikson, Csikszentmihalyi and others--have championed the educational benefits of play. Yet many professors and administrators are boggled by the idea of playing academic games in college. They instantly dismiss faculty initiatives like "Reacting to the…

Critical thinking pedagogy is misguided. Ostensibly a cure for narrowness of thought, by using the emotions appropriate to conflict, it names only one mode of relation to material among many others. Ostensibly a cure for fallacies, critical thinking tends to dishonesty in practice because it habitually leaps to premature ideas of what the object…

Three studies were combined to examine the effects of creativity and imagination on the academic performance of design students. Study 1 conducted an exploratory factor analysis to determine the most appropriate structure of the Creativity Capability Scale (CCS) in a sample of 313 college students. The scale was a new self-report measure, and it…

Introductory sociology classes afford instructors an opportunity to expose students, often from a variety of backgrounds and majors, to the sociological imagination. In this article, I describe how the use of secrets from a popular website, PostSecret.com, can help teach students about the sociological imagination and incorporate biographical…

Soft skills programs (SSPs) for staff are now an established part of staff learning and development in organisations. The lived experience of university staff attending these types of programmes has until now remained largely unexplored. As part of a professional doctorate in education, I used autoethnography to investigate the 'social world' of…