"Beyond Standards" highlights the structural conditions that have undermined the success of the standards movement and challenges us to confront them. The book offers an impassioned argument about the ways that our decentralized educational systems undermine the pursuit of educational equity and excellence. Morgan Polikoff applies a wide…

In "Hood Feminism," Mikki Kendall critiques mainstream feminism arguing that the feminist movement does not focus on the basic needs of all women. Kendall defines feminism as "the work that you do, and the people you do it for who matter more than anything else" (Kendall, 2020, p.xiii). She focuses on the experiences of…

A realist approach to learning is what I propose here. This is based on a non-epistemic dimension whose presence is a necessary assumption for a concept of learning of a life-world as complementary to learning within a life-world. I develop my approach in opposition to Jürgen Habermas' pragmatic approach, which seems to lack of something from a…

Individuals draw conclusions about possibilities from assertions that make no explicit reference to them. The model theory postulates that assertions such as disjunctions refer to possibilities. Hence, a disjunction of the sort, "A or B or both," where "A" and "B" are sensible clauses, yields mental models of an…

Service-learning has become an integral component of American education, and scholars continue to debate its definition, purposes, and outcomes. Service-learning in the classroom is not without critics at present, however. This article provides an introductory examination of Irving Babbitt's critiques of the service-learning ethic at its inception…

Transhumanism promotes the application of emerging technologies and genetics in order to overcome the physical and cognitive limitations of the human species. In this article, the main question to be considered is the following: is Nietzsche's notion of educational self-overcoming compatible with the idea of biotechnological self-enhancement?…

Human capital theory assumes that education determines the marginal productivity of labour and this determines earnings. Since the 1960s, it has dominated the economics, and policy and public understanding, of relations between education and work. It has become widely assumed that intellectual formation constitutes a mode of economic capital,…

With increasing threats to democracy, we call for communication educators to renew and re-examine their commitment to advancing civic engagement in the basic course. Given recent scholarly criticism that civic engagement pedagogies falsely present democratic practice as neutral or apolitical and reinforce the status quo, we set an agenda for basic…

The primary goal of this response to Eric C. Sheffield's presidential address "Human Expression and Meaning Making: Pondering the Role of the Medium in Creating a Life Worth Living," is to extend some of the excellent points raised and to offer some questions for continued inquiry. To extend Sheffield's critique, the author offer three…

Educational research, and research in the Social Sciences more generally, has experienced a growth in the introduction of ethical review boards since the 1990s. Increasingly, universities have set up ethics review procedures that require researchers to submit applications seeking approval to conduct research. Review boards and the rules and…

This article analyses, mingles and blends divergent and complementary strands from the thinking of Hannah Arendt (1906-1975) and Sir Alec Clegg (1909-1986), two contemporaneous but different influential public figures and thinkers in the post-World War Two period. The paper uses these strands to construct a critique of the current colonisation of…

How can Levinas's work help language educators respond ethically to encounters with students? This paper considers this question in the context of adult immigrants learning an additional language, and is interested specifically in the existential aspects of language learning. How does the experience of "coming into being" in a new…

In this article, I focus on a group of people whose voices in archival materials are especially hard, or very unusual, to find. This group comprises intellectually "abnormal" children. Using the example of German-speaking Switzerland and focusing on the late 19th and early 20th centuries, I will show the types of materials produced on…

This paper studies how Emerson's 'Self-Reliance' offers a meaningful account of political and moral self-education in Western democracies. Emerson's moral perfectionism involves an ethical, political and democratic individualism that needs to be reconsidered. This paper explores a perfectionist interpretation of the modern forms of self-education…

In a recent article in this journal, Sciffer, Perry, and McConney identify the risk of relying on insufficient within-unit variation as a serious flaw in a number of studies using student fixed effects regression to identify the effects of school socioeconomic composition (school SES) on academic achievement, including one by Armor, Marks, and…