This article explores the context for the accompanying suite of papers on creating and sustaining democratic spaces in education. Prompted by the centenary of Summerhill, the internationally famous democratic school founded in Suffolk, England, in 1921, by A.S. Neill, this collection of papers explores and broadens out the central questions at the…

There is much to celebrate about the liberal-progressive approach championed by New Zealand, which continues to be a prized feature of New Zealand education. Many liberal-progressive practices developed in New Zealand and contextualised for New Zealand students that sought to expand and enrich education were borrowed from Native Schools, Maori…

When the newly appointed professor of medicine at the University of Rinteln, Johann Peter Lotichius (1598-1669), delivered an oration entitled "Oratio super fatalibus hoc tempore academiarum in Germania periculis" ("Oration on the pernicious dangers to the universities of contemporary Germany") at said university in February…

This article begins with the question: "Why is study abroad focused on discrete locations and stasis when human history is characterized by movement, flows, and connectivity?" The answer to that question can be found in the original purposes of study abroad in addition to the historical and epistemological context in which these programs…

In this article, we provide a comparative analysis of public education in Germany and the US, focusing on historical and contemporary challenges to education, "Bildung," and citizenry in the modern nation state. In particular, we examine relations among nation building processes and education, transnational discourses, mutual influences,…

The authors used a conceptual analysis, following Foucauldian genealogy, to consider the history of Nila Banton Smith's "American Reading Instruction." The goal was to make better sense of the challenges and opportunities facing literacy instruction today and to articulate the enormous responsibilities of literacy scholars to critically…

One neglected aspect of the Gorbachev perestroika era in Russia [1985-1991] was the remarkable "pedagogy of cooperation" (or pedagogika sotrudnichestva) movement, a renewal of the experimental tradition in education. Central to this was Edward Dneprov, a brilliant and forceful individual whose views and personality substantially shaped…

Kenya's 2017 competency-based curriculum, the Basic Education Curriculum Framework (BECF), seeks to address the skills gap in the education system and make the curriculum relevant to learners. Using Soka education as the philosophical framework, we provide a comprehensive review of BECF. The analysis in this essay covers the noteworthy provisions,…

Over 40 years after the publication of the "Report of the Committee of Enquiry into the Education of Handicapped Children and Young People," commonly referred to as the "Warnock Report," this article uniquely considers its legacy in the context of Northern Ireland. The article adopts a Foucauldian genealogical approach to…

The internationalization of education (IE) has accelerated across the past two decades. Although there are now a range of representations and theorizations of IE, they find little connection across domains and levels. Toward bolstering a more coherent field of IE, which translates across distinctive expressions of IE, this paper argues for a…

At the beginning of the 20th century, there were several women in Italy, who gave pedagogy a new impulse. Among those women, two educationalists, Maria Montessori and Giuseppina Pizzigoni introduced new visions of the school by designing strategies that overcame the barriers to education. The first, with the structuring of a method, arose in Rome…

This is the second of three articles on "Sources of Authority in Education". All use the work of Amy Gutmann as a heuristic device to describe and explain the prevalence of market-based models of Education Reform in the United States as part of what Pasi Sahlberg terms the Global Education Reform Movement (GERM). This movement is based…

The historical debate between a liberal orientation of university education and a university education with a more practical orientation has been reproduced by defenders and detractors of the course that is being adopted by the European Higher Education Area (EHEA). Instead of resorting to a dichotomous view of these two arguments, this article…

This article reflects on how English as a school subject was positioned in the seminal paper "The Teaching of English in England", otherwise known as The Newbolt Report, and its relationship with current government policy in England. Nearly a century after the Report's publication, questions regarding the content and purpose of English…

Action learning was introduced into China less than 20 years ago, but has rapidly become a valuable tool for organizations seeking to solve problems, develop their leaders, and become learning organizations. This article provides an historical overview of action learning in China, its cultural underpinnings, and five case studies. It concludes…