In this essay, Rubén Gaztambide-Fernández reflects on the comments made in a forum convened to reflect on his article "Why the Arts Don't 'Do' Anything: Toward a New Vision for Cultural Production in Education," published in the "Harvard Educational Review" ("HER")'s special issue entitled…

In the spring of 2013, the "Harvard Educational Review" ("HER") published a special issue entitled "Expanding Our Vision for the Arts in Education" (Vol. 83, No. 1). Following a variety of forward-looking essays and arts learner reflections concerning the potential of the arts in education, the issue concluded with a…

Alfie Kohn made the case for competition being destructive to education. The truth may be that there are two separate ways to contest: true competition, which is a healthy desire to excel, and decompetition, which is the unhealthy desire merely to beat the opponent. Decompetition leads to the ills that Kohn enumerated. Educators should teach their…

The article by David Stoesz and Howard J. Karger, "Reinventing Social Work Accreditation," is misleading and erroneous in its assumptions, makes unsubstantiated assertions, and demonstrates an ideological shallowness on the part of the authors in their understanding of social work education, the Council on Social Work Education, and the…

The main assumption of the article under discussion seems flawed and misconstrued. The "professional decline of social work" neither is because of the "lack of scholarship of the Board of Directors" nor is an outcome of an imperfect accreditation process. The presumption that independently achieved accreditation will improve the quality of…

It is contended that in Harvey Pegues's essay on objectivism and constructivism in the summer 2007 issue of "The Educational Forum", Pegues conducted an intellectual discourse in which legitimate or good-faith disagreement was not an option, and disparaged and imputed the negative motives with which he disagreed. This article responds by pointing…

In this commentary, I review Kellogg's comments on a recent editorial in the journal "Mind, Culture, and Activity" (Roth, 2008). Concerning Kellogg's code-switching model for learning language, I present and exemplify a dialectic problem of multi/cultural literacy: the first articulation that crosses the boundaries of cultures and languages…

The importance of the legacy of Ninian Smart is a crucial issue, precisely because, to the author's mind, much of contemporary British religious education has signally failed to face up to the reality of its historical and continuing failure to further and realise liberal educational aims: it congratulates itself on its achievements while…

In this article, the author argues that Emerson repudiated the formalism of nineteenth century belletristic, mechanistic, reason-centered, American rhetoric influenced by Hugh Blair. Instead Emerson promoted a rhetoric with imagination at its center, which calls for civic duty. (Contains 33 notes.)

This essay comments on articles comprising a "Journal of Moral Education" Special Issue (September, 2008, 37[3]). The issue was intended to honour the 50th anniversary of Lawrence Kohlberg's doctoral dissertation and his subsequent impact on the field of moral development and education. The articles were characterised by the Issue editor (Don…

The authors believe that Stoesz and Karger did not go far enough in their critique. The struggling state of the profession and of social work education is symptomatic of a much larger and fundamental systemic problem that cannot be addressed solely by fixing the Council on Social Work Education or increasing requirements for Social Science…

In this commentary on Brayboy and Castagno's paper, published in this volume, we discuss, on the one hand, many points of agreement between their proposal of culturally responsive schooling for indigenous youth and El-Hani and Mortimer's proposal of culturally-sensitive science education. On the other hand, we focus on a key disagreement, not only…

In their rejoinder to our article about their work on evidence-based science education, Millar "et al." (2008) claim that we misrepresented their position, and that our argument was false or unclear in key respects. In this brief reply we argue that their criticisms are misdirected, and that they fail to engage in the sort of dialogue…

A reader of Traianou and Hammersley's article (in this issue), which discusses at some length the work we undertook in the "Evidence-based Practice in Science Education (EPSE)" Research Network, might attribute to us views that are rather different from those which we in fact hold, and which we have sought to present in our own accounts…

The authors maintain that higher education has tamely responded to pillory by political conservatives. This essay advocates for Michael Berube's defense of liberalism in higher education, "What's Liberal about the Liberal Arts? Classroom Politics and "Bias" in Higher Education." The writers also counter what they view as conservative attacks on…