Postmodernism, born under western secular conditions, has the following characteristics: it emphasizes pluralism and relativism and rejects any certain belief and absolute value; it conflicts with essentialism, and considers human identity to be a social construct; it rejects the idea that values are based on developmental realities and also…

In this article, Mark Featherstone proposes to explore Bernard Stiegler's work through the lens of the politics of education and in particular the idea of the university, which becomes a pharmacological space of, on the one hand, utopian possibility, and, on the other hand, dystopian limitation, destruction, and death in his recent "States of…

Background/Context: The rapid pace of technological change, undergirded by near ubiquitous access to the web, is producing a new learning ecology--a new ecology of information, of knowledge, of reading, of teaching, and of thinking. This instant availability of digital resources frees both time and cognitive energy that may be used to facilitate…

A large diversity of theoretical frameworks exists in the physical education literature. This article focuses on two of those frameworks to examine their compatibility and their complementarity. The classroom ecology paradigm concentrates on the balance between three task systems, two vectors, and programs of actions proposed by the physical…

In the United States, the community food movement has been put forward as a potential solution for a global food system that fails to provide just and equitable access to nutritious food. This claim has been subject to the criticism of a variety of scholars and activists, some of whom contend that the alternative food movement is complicit in the…

This volume argues for the need of a common ground that bridges leadership studies, curriculum theory, and Didaktik. It proposes a non-affirmative education theory and its core concepts along with discursive institutionalism as an analytical tool to bridge these fields. It concludes with implications of its coherent theoretical framing for future…

This paper addresses the problem of curriculum design in the Humanities and Social Sciences, and more specifically the challenge of designing foundation courses for first-generation or "disadvantaged" learners. Located in the social realist school of the sociology of education studies that builds on the legacy of Basil Bernstein, we…

Theories of mind are implicitly embedded in educational research. The predominant theory of mind during the latter half of the twentieth century has focused primarily on the individual mind in isolation, context-free problem-solving and mental representations and reasoning, what we refer to as "cognitivism." Over the last two decades, CS…

This paper argues that action research finds a rationale in the pragmatic position that knowledge is provisional and generated through a transaction between agent and environment. Action research finds a further methodological rationale in the pragmatic view that knowledge is generated within indeterminate situations, requires habits of reflection…

This paper begins by identifying what it sees as the current crisis in curriculum theory. Following a brief history of the field, it argues that recent developments have led to it losing its object--what is taught and learned in school--and its distinctive role in the educational sciences. Arising from this brief account of the origins and nature…

John Dewey's "Democracy and Education" is the touchstone for a great deal of modern educational theory. It covers a wide range of themes and issues relating to education, including teaching, learning, educational environments, subject matter, values, and the nature of work and play. This "Handbook" is designed to help experts…

This article provides a material enactment of educational theory to explore how we might do educational theory differently by defamiliarising the familiar. Theory is often assumed to be abstract, located solely in the realm of ideas and separate from practice. However, this view of theory emerges from a set of ontological and epistemological…

Recent neoliberal policies and societal trends point toward new and perennial tensions for nation-state education, including curriculum/Didaktik and leadership thereof. These challenges affect governance/leadership and curriculum with changes in aims and values together in ways that demand coherence, yet the traditionally disparate fields of…

This paper examines the respective contribution of two theoretical approaches to teaching and learning: the classroom ecology (CE) framework from Anglo-American research and the joint action in didactics (JAD) framework, which is part of French "didactique" research. This theoretical comparison is grounded in data from a case study in a…

During recent years, we have seen an increase in the complexity of school leadership as knowledge work. The new forms of knowledge available to school leadership, such as performance data and survey-based data, raise the expectation that leaders make relevant use of these knowledge resources. Theory and policy claim that new knowledge is of…