This study aims to critique the concept of active learning in childhood education based on Hegelian Bildung. We have defined childhood education from the perspective of Hegel’s Bildung in The Phenomenology of Spirit. We describe childhood education as a ‘primary Bildung’ having the aim of ‘entering into the conceptual world’. This aim indicates that children can and are required to express their experiences in conceptual language. Finally, we critique the conceptual components of active learning from the Hegelian point of view (...) and suggest three alternative components: ‘child-educator interaction’, ‘understanding historical knowledge’, and ‘addressing concrete-abstract affairs.’ We suggest that the concept of active learning needs to be replaced by ‘Communicative-Interactive Learning (CIL)’. CIL takes both objectivity and subjectivity into account during the process of knowledge formation in education. (shrink)

This study aims to critique the concept of active learning in childhood education based on Hegelian Bildung. We have defined childhood education from the perspective of Hegel’s Bildung in The Phenomenology of Spirit. We describe childhood education as a ‘primary Bildung’ having the aim of ‘entering into the conceptual world’. This aim indicates that children can and are required to express their experiences in conceptual language. Finally, we critique the conceptual components of active learning from the Hegelian point of view (...) and suggest three alternative components: ‘child-educator interaction’, ‘understanding historical knowledge’, and ‘addressing concrete-abstract affairs.’ We suggest that the concept of active learning needs to be replaced by ‘Communicative-Interactive Learning (CIL)’. CIL takes both objectivity and subjectivity into account during the process of knowledge formation in education. (shrink)

Taking their starting point from the nineteenth-century reformer Robert Owen’s concern to promote the education of the poor, Hopkins (2016) together with the other authors in the volume, investigat...

Sriprakash, Rudolph and Gerrard write: ‘There is an ongoing need to hold in tension, and be deeply conscious of, the past that endures in the present as much as there is a need to hold in tension,...

Covid-19 has occasioned ongoing shifts in discourse as language changes to reflect and shape new stages of the global pandemic and different voices weigh in on topics, such as infectious diseases and vaccine efficacy. This study looks at an instance of this that relates to the ‘global education industry’, where cancellation of the International Baccalaureate’s May 2020 high stakes examination instigated a wide-ranging discussion about the organisation. This was triggered by the publication of IB results for 174,355 students in 146 (...) countries, many of which showed large discrepancies between predicted and final grades. Using computer-assisted discourse analysis and a corpus of tweets containing the hashtag #ibscandal, patterns of language use are analysed, providing valuable new insights into the impact on students in different national contexts. (shrink)

Schools, Space and Culinary Capital addresses some of the key issues concerning social inequality and food insecurity and the relationship between the two in an empirical case of school meals in an...

This article responds to scholarly calls to engage with diaspora in the context of transnational educational mobilities in global higher education. It maintains that transnational academic mobilities produce a particular kind of academic diaspora, that is often valued by both home and host countries but in ways that vary and serve different interests and aspirations. While the contrasting perspectives on brain circulation and brain drain persist, what this article argues is that systemic inequalities are (re)produced through the processes of transnational (...) academic mobilities, which privilege the mobility of some and not others, and at the same time under-value the home-grown academics and overseas-trained academics that return home. The current diaspora politics is located within this complex, hierarchical, and dynamic cultural, political and economic space. In particular, it pinpoints how the promoted desirability of diasporic brains and talents in policy and practice has co3ntinued to reproduce and consolidate academic inequalities. The article then argues for place-based/at home transnationality, seeing it as productive counter position to help reduce inequalities. The article employs self-study research and is informed by a bricolage of data on Vietnam and its Vietnamese transnational academic diasporas gathered at different points in time and in different contexts. (shrink)

This study compares the estimated grammar school effect in different regression models, and explains why previous evidence of the effetiveness of grammar school is mixed. Like most studies of school effectiveness evaluation, previous research on grammar school effect usually applies regression to control for confounding between-school factors and determines whether attending grammar schools is associated with an academic benefit. While this value-added approach is very feasible and widely adopted, there is usually substantial variation in the evidence produced when statistical choices (...) differ. Applying the national data with more than 149,000 pupils, the study presents the sensitivity of grammar school effectiveness when baseline variables, outcome variables, and regression techniques differ. The findings will help researchers understand the mixed evidence of the effectiveness of grammar schools so far, and the unsettled debate on grammar schools nationally. While inconsistent estimations due to passive design is a common trait in school effectiveness evaluation studies, grammar schools’ effectiveness might be even more sensitive to statistical choices due to their special student intakes. Interpreting the variation between different statistical models, the findings caution researchers in dealing with the evidence in grammar school effectiveness and call for stronger designs as well as more carefully selected explanatory variables. (shrink)

In the face of global histories of extraction, domination and dispossession, the project of social justice requires nothing short of remaking the world system. This is the premise of Olúfẹ́mi O. Tá...

There is a growing literature studying the ‘non-traditional’ type of international schools. However, a less explored and under-theorised area is the changing dynamics of the global-local interactions in the way these international schools are being redefined and shaped by local processes, regimes of control, and mechanisms. Drawing on empirical evidence from sixteen ‘non-traditional’ international schools in urban China, our paper contributes to the literature in three ways. Theoretically, we developed the notion of ‘reining in the international’ to draw analytic attention (...) to the state power and social agency in controlling and directing the global flows of international schooling. Empirically, our paper provides concrete evidence to show the disjuncture occurring when the global/international is interrupted and transformed by local/national conditions. Third, we argue that in the case of China, the local has taken charge as the ‘content supplier and negotiator’ in the global-local confluence of forms adopted by international schools. (shrink)

Attempts to establish utopian communities raise fascinating questions about how far the limitations of ordinary life can be transcended, and what obstacles groups of ostensibly like-minded people e...

Bourdieu’s concept of habitus clivé illuminates Indigenous Australians’ experiences in tertiary environments for both Aboriginal students and Aboriginal staff. Habitus formed through family, schooling and social class is also shaped by urban, regional or rural upbringing, creating a durable sense of self. Aboriginal people in Australia live in all of these places, often in marginalised circumstances. Bourdieu’s more specific concept of habitus clivé, or divided self, is less well known than habitus, but offers value in giving expression to Indigenous people’s (...) experiences within a dominant White society. The complexity of participation and educational change is explored here through the experiences of three authors’ intersecting positionalities within the Australian academy. Developing more nuanced scholarly language reduces the imposition of perspectives that see Indigenous people as objects within western frameworks. Scholarly understanding and respect for Australia’s first peoples’ concepts and cultural practices would engage more appropriately and fairly with Aboriginal knowledge and society. Habitus clivé chronicles one version of habitus that can be changed or be reconfirmed but not easily or by fiat. Understanding the concept can be learned, however. Educational opportunity, glorified in today’s higher education, means little for Aboriginal people without long-term strategies addressing existentially and culturally split habitus. (shrink)

When the United Kingdom has figured in the modern history of study abroad, it has featured almost exclusively in the role of host country with little attention paid to the study abroad patterns of UK students. In order to gain a rounded picture of the UK’s role in post-war study abroad, this article explores the position of the UK within the context of the rich data gathered by UNESCO. It argues that there is strong evidence that the UK was actually (...) one of the most active countries in sending its students overseas and that this activity increased (both in absolute terms and relative to other countries) significantly in the 1960s and 70s. Following a brief analysis of the UK’s role as both a host and exporter of study abroad students on a global scale, its relationship as a sender country with two particular geographical areas is considered: firstly, the Commonwealth that has been the focus of much of the existing secondary literature, and secondly, continental Europe and the USA which have featured much less frequently in the work of historians. Various reasons for the significant rise in the number of UK students studying abroad are explored – in particular, the role of government attitudes towards overseas study including the possibility of developing student exchange as an instrument of cultural diplomacy. The article pays particular attention to the period between the publication of the Robbins Report in 1963 and the beginnings of the institutionalisation of study abroad (in Europe) in the late 1970s. (shrink)

Thirty years after the demise of the Soviet bloc, there still persists a rhetoric of differentiation and a discursive polarisation between the Western and the non-Western educational thinking and practices. This rhetoric overshadows a potential similarity, or homogeneity, between the dominant and several marginalised contexts. Regional, local and personal variations are prematurely attributed to fundamental, if often poorly argued, cultural differences. We seek to introduce and to preliminarily summarise the existing understandings of refraction in education and social research. Sporadically used (...) but seldom defined, the refraction metaphor appears to feature: (a) a multiplicity of viewpoints as an incentive for social research, (b) non-relativistic, scientific progress as an end value for understanding social reality, (c) a balanced approach towards homogeneity and heterogeneity in social research, and (d) a substantially historical orientation towards analysing homogeneity and heterogeneity. Education in the former socialist European countries demonstrates how heterogeneity is rhetorically overstated and how variations can be more adequately addressed by analysing refractions. (shrink)

There are widespread concerns about the mental health implications of the pandemic, particularly among university students, an already at-risk population for poor mental health. This study looked at 1,281 UK university students, recruited through the Prolific website. Participants were asked to complete the Attitudes towards COVID-19 Scale, the CORE-10, the PERMA Profiler, the GAD-7 and the Office for National Statistics wellbeing questions (ONS4). The first survey was conducted between May 14th and 16th, when the UK was in national lockdown. The (...) second survey was carried out between June 26th and July 15th. There was only an 11% attrition rate between the two time points. Well-being improved overall between the two time points. Some findings were contradictory as overall well-being, anxiety and levels of flourishing improved, but reports of psychological distress increased. It is also important to note that levels of positivity about the pandemic increased as time went on. There was evidence that higher levels of positivity were linked to better mental health outcomes. Encouraging a positive mindset and outlook in students, probably through positive psychology-based interventions, might act as a protective factor against severe mental illness. The wider relevance and practical implications for higher education are discussed. (shrink)

Studies on doctoral education can be categorised into three broad themes: ‘the macro level, the meso level and the micro level’ (Sin and Tavares, 2020, p. 3). Recent years have witnessed a rise in...

The considerable rise in the visibility and reach of the concept of wellbeing in relation to education merits a far more rigorously conceived body of research than we have at present. This is in pa...

In this monograph Horsthemke provides a philosophically robust account of knowledge and refutes the idea of knowledge being premised on multiple truths. I am a proponent of his model on what should...

This book brings together a series of insightful chapters about the emerging topic of character education in the university. As the editors of this volume state, most recent initiatives aimed to cu...