Purpose: Phenomenology has a long tradition as a qualitative research method in the social and health sciences. The application of phenomenological methods to understand lived experiences and subjectivities offers researchers a rich tapestry of methodological approaches, often however, the availability of these methods to researchers is tempered…

Idealizations are omnipresent in science. However, to date, science education research has paid surprisingly little attention to the use of idealizations in fostering students' model competence and understanding of the nature of science (NOS). The starting point for the theoretical reflection in this paper is that insufficient consideration of…

This essay is a plea to art educators in what is a global climate in a "permacrisis" both politically and physically. This is a deliberate and persuasive provocation to reorientate art education to avoid a reiteration that is taking place when the 20th and 21st centuries are compared in relation to the striking changes that are taking…

Modern democratic societies tend to appeal to the authority of science when dealing with important challenges and solving their problems. Nevertheless, distrust in science remains widespread among the public, and, as a result, scientific voices are often ignored or discarded in favour of other perspectives. Though superficially…

This article addresses the following question: Can speculation be used in social science research or should this not be an option? The secondary literature on speculation, which is minimal, is presented and discussed. It is noted that natural scientists often differentiate between a scientific form of speculation and the old metaphysical form of…

Ways of knowing in social sciences and educational research are sculpted by normative knowing of ways that are rooted in prescriptive histories of positivist and qualitative traditions. In this paper, by subscribing to what St. Pierre and Lather initiated as the "postqualitative movement", we turn from tradition to re-search research…

The recent shift in social science research toward philosophies of the more-than-human has pushed many scholars to question their understanding of units of analysis and agency. While many engage with agencies of the material, few have attempted to address what might be called the agency of ideas. Here, Alexander Pratt argues that engaging with the…

The history and philosophy of science (HPS) plays a special role in education. An elective HPS course on the philosophy of scientific experimentation for young scientists and graduate students of natural science is presented. The course bears a pragmatic character, and its main aims include the development of critical thinking (CT),…

Philosophy is concerned with fundamental questions about knowledge, truth, reality, experience, justice and what is right and wrong. In this article, the authors discuss how philosophy and science can be taught together in the primary classroom.

There is wide agreement that ethical considerations are a valuable aspect of a data science curriculum, and to that end, many data science programs offer courses in data science ethics. There are not always, however, explicit connections between data science ethics and the centuries-old work on ethics within the discipline of philosophy. Here, we…

The vast majority of well-informed philosophers of science and scientists who are clearly (uncontroversially) scientists are able to extensionally differentiate between almost all scientific and non-scientific practices, disciplines, theories, attitudes, modes of procedure, etc., and do so or would do so in much the same way. This legitimately…

Conrad Hal Waddington (1905--1975) was an English biologist who was especially interested in the big (metaphysical) questions of life. His thinking has become part of the foundation of modern systems biology. This article applies his thinking to middle-years school biology curricula (for ages 11-16), to see if their approach to epistemic questions…

This paper advocates reading philosophy and using its concepts in educational and social science research. The lengthy engagement with the various concepts and conceptual orders of poststructuralism required for post qualitative inquiry exceeds the scope of reading required for a conventional literature review at the beginning of a typical…

The Education drives the Future of Humanity. The Wishes and Visions of Humankind have to drive the Education. What is the final goal of Education? To bring up a healthy, emotionally mature, wise, knowledgable nourisher of life, who understands and feels the reality, based on ethics, humanism and compassion, as essential characteristics of a human…

Scientific insights can help us better understand ourselves, others, and the world we share. These insights can also radically challenge our sense of who we are, our place in the universe, and the very nature of the universe. When science communicators venture into this metaphysical terrain they quickly encounter dearly held religious beliefs.…