Individuals' sense of who they are and what their positions are in relation to others is known to be their positionality. Positionalities influence individuals' conception of the world, thus their epistemologies. A few of the positionalities that exist, and included in this paper, are gender, spirituality, race/ethnicity, and social class. All…

Humanism and the concept of the human that informs pedagogical discourse have been increasingly questioned by what has been called "post-human times." In this paper, we situate Paulo Freire's (1970) "Pedagogy of the Oppressed," and Nathan Snaza and John Weaver's (2014) "Posthumanism and Educational Research" within…

If educators presuppose that brain and mind are synonymous, perhaps it is out of necessity. Such an equivalency might be required in order for mind to be accessible, knowable and a "thing" like the brain is. Such a presupposition, that mind is a thing which we can understand nonetheless rests on an insecure foundation. As suggested by…

This article addresses mapmaking as a multimodal method and lens for place-based ethnographic inquiry. I describe three contexts drawn from my research on and teaching of mapmaking. Drawing from my own sense-making of mapping as an embodied phenomenon, I discuss how the fields of sensory and materialist studies might expand the interpretive…

In the development of spiritual and cultural heritage, the Kazakh renaissance, which began with the implementation of the "Cultural heritage" national project, has exposed the problems of self-identity, uniqueness, national and global relations. One reason is misunderstanding of nomadism as a kind of "anti-civilization", an…

At present, European education policy, research and administration is dominated by a specific concept of reform, namely so-called output governance, whose rise to prominence in national contexts in the 1990s coincided with the advance of international tests of school performance such as PISA. In this article it is argued that there is much more to…

The theoretical and methodological model of Mathematical Working Space (MWS) is introduced in this paper. For over 10 years, the model has been the object of collaborative research among various researchers, generally coming from French and Spanish speaking countries. Articulating epistemological and cognitive aspects, the MWS model is aimed at…

Teacher knowledge is currently explored in three major research paradigms. This paper reviews how teaching and personal educational knowledge are related in these three paradigms, namely: the evidence paradigm, the life history paradigm and the practice theory paradigm. The paradigms can be linked through their demand to elaborate knowledge…

As a result of developments in public education in the nineteenth-century Ottoman state, pedagogic professionalism began to direct school studies by setting scientific discourse against conventional epistemology. However, the strong conviction that the late Ottoman Empire was secularised progressively over years leads to the neglect of the…

The three aspects of teacher change--ontological, epistemological, and sociocultural--are traditionally regarded as independent. Usually only the epistemological aspect is highlighted in formal teacher education. In this paper, I argue that a holistic and interdependent view of these aspects is needed. Thus, this paper aims to explore the process…

Processes of knowledge construction are investigated. A learner is constructing knowledge about the trigonometric functions and their geometric meaning on the unit circle. The analysis is based on the dynamically nested epistemic action model for abstraction in context. Different tasks are offered to the learner. In his effort to perform the…

This paper, of theoretical nature, explores the levels of approach and abstraction of research in the field of education policy: description, analysis and understanding. Such categories were developed based on concepts of Bourdieu's theory and on the grounds of epistemological studies focused on education policy and meta-research. This paper…

The importance of knowledge about science is well established, and it has a long history in the area of science education. More recently, the specialized literature has highlighted the search for consensus in relation to what should be taught in this regard, that is, what should compose the science curricula of elementary and high school levels.…

Many published scholars argue for constructivism as a basis for academic advising theory. However, few have discussed the commensurate ontological assumptions of constructivist thinking. Potential problems with the metaphysical view of the student in contemporary academic advising may be attributable to constructivism. John Dewey's critique of…

In this article, I examine changes in the field of cognitive development and in my own thinking over the past 40 years. The review focuses on three periods. In the first, Piaget's theory was dominant, and my research and that of many others was aimed at understanding the many fascinating changes in children's thinking that Piaget documented and at…