Before and during the era when mass elementary schooling took off, children populated classrooms in many roles and not only as learners. The traditional teaching situation was actually full of children in roles as instructors, inspectors, and helpers, among others. In this contribution, the dichotomisation of expected classroom roles, being a…

The origins of philosophy of education as a discipline are relatively late, and can be traced in the Anglo-American academic world from the 1960s and a specific emphasis on conceptual problems deriving from the analytical tradition of philosophy. In more recent years, however, there has been a notable 'Continentalist' turn in the discipline,…

Fénelon and Voltaire, the two French philosophers and pedagogues, influenced a wide range of people in the 17th and 18th centuries in Europe. The philosophers who followed were inspired by their work which contained ideological hints and promoted humanitarian awareness. We followed the historical analysis method, we intend to present through…

The "spatial turn" in education policy studies fuelled interest in Lefebvre's work: initially, in his work "Production of Space" and, more recently, "Rhythmanalysis" and "Right to the City". Yet, although in these texts Lefebvre critiques universities and schools and introduces original pedagogical concepts,…

Teaching in university education programmes, can, at times, involve the uncomfortable situation of discriminatory speech. A situation that has often occurred in our own teaching, and in those of our colleagues, is the citation of homophobic and heterosexist comments.These are comments that are more likely to occur in foundation subjects such as…

As part of the attempts to revitalise Corsican, a regional language of France, and to reverse the language shift to French, language activists and academics have sought to apply the model of a polynomic language to what is considered as one language, but what is, in fact, a number of different Corsicans, each with varying levels of mutual…

We tried to determine the reasoning behind the stances taken by a group of 19-21-year-old students on the controversial issue of the feasibility and acceptability of human gene therapy. The students were in training at a biotechnology institute. We organised classroom debates, punctuated by phases of epistemological "disturbances". We…