In UNESCO's 2021 report, "Reimagining our futures together: A new social contract for education," futures emerge as a key orientation for establishing not just improved educational systems but for creating liberatory worlds for everyone. Amidst the COVID-19 pandemic, social and economic instability, and the climate crisis, the future of…

This study examines whether the Internet of Toys (IoToys) (de)limits children's make-believe play and whether the functionality and manipulatives offered by the IoToys serve as motivational pleasure (tactile, virtual and visual) for children to engage in make-believe play. Combining Piagetian and Vygotskian ideas of play as a unity of cognition…

Ted Hughes is one of the most important poets in English literature of the last century and his huge volume of work (including his poetry, prose, plays, translations, letters and critical essays) has received a great deal of critical attention. Hughes was, of course, much more than just a writer. Throughout his life he was deeply engaged with…

Education as a deliberate activity and purposive process necessarily involves mediation, in the sense that the educator mediates between the child and the world. This can take different forms: the educator may function as a guide who initiates children into particular practices and domains and their modes of thinking and perceiving; or act as a…

This article proposes a 'pataphysical turn for arts-based research through the work of Alfred Jarry. Jarry outlined a unique research program that falls neatly neither into scientific inquiry nor artistic creation. Rather, this type of research can be defined in terms of three interconnected themes: (1) a postmetaphysical examination of the laws…

In Danish early childhood education and care (ECEC), pedagogues traditionally work in a child-centred manner, valuing the children's experiences. During the last 150 years pedagogues have developed expertise in framing everyday life for children while paying double attention to the children's perspectives, on one hand, and to their own pedagogical…

An imagineering learning model using advance organizers with the internet of things was developed to promote creative innovation for learners in the 21st century. It is an innovation initiated by integrating classroom learning and technology that connects with the internet of things. The objectives of this research were (1) to study and synthesize…

Early childhood/educational environmental imaginations transmit national, global and planetary views of the world through texts, visual representations and material objects. These representations produce politics, including nationalism and globalism, and play a part in policy making as well as in how children learn to view and relate to the world.…

Drawing from Anzaldúa's (1999) ideas on borderlands, this conceptual article addresses the potential of basketball as a space for developing critical subjectivities within minoritized communities. Further, working through relevant scholarship at the intersections of race, play, education, and sports, connections are made as to how basketball is…

This article explores the cognitive aspects of utopia in environmental and sustainability education. Utopia here is understood as the imaginary transformation of society, entailing a critique of society and its imaginary reconstruction aligned with the ideal of just and flourishing communities. To gain insight into the processes at play, I develop…

The COVID-19 pandemic has forced children to reckon with the causal relations underlying disease transmission. What are children's theories of how COVID-19 is transmitted? And how do they understand the relation between COVID-19 susceptibility and the need for disease-mitigating behavior? We asked these questions in the context of children's…

The authors explore children's symbolic play that involves themes of fear and darkness, and they investigate the nature of children's binary oppositions, particularly between self and other. Their account is based on a year-long qualitative study they conducted with seven children, four to ten years of age. They observed the children engage with…

Previous research has investigated the nature of imagination as a construct related to multiple forms of higher-order cognition. Despite the emergence of various conceptualizations of imagination, few attempts have been made to explore the structure of imagination as a trait in the context of existing hierarchically-nested personality dimensions.…

This article is a retrospective look at Chris Lebron's essay 'Thoughts on Racial Democratic Education and Moral Virtue'. I argue that Lebron's work remains extremely relevant, both for its vision of antiracist education, and for the methodological questions it allows readers to contend with. As we are living in an age of increasing backlash to…

With the goal of exploring a motivating way to approach world language teaching and learning in order to promote lifelong language learning, this article reports on a year-long, collaborative action research study of two middle-school German classes that used an imagined communities curriculum. The curriculum, co-constructed with the classroom…