Buber’s distinction between the ‘I-It’ mode and the ‘I-Thou’ mode is seminal for dialogic education. While Buber introduces the idea of dialogic space, an idea which has proved useful for the analysis of dialogic education with technology, his account fails to engage adequately with the role of technology. This paper offers an introduction to the significance of the I-It/I-Thou duality of technology in relation with opening dialogic space. This is followed by a short schematic history of educational technology which reveals (...) the role technology plays, not only in opening dialogic space, but also in expanding dialogic space. The expansion of dialogic space is an expansion of what it means to be ‘us’ as dialogic engagement facilitates the incorporation, into our shared sense of identity, of aspects of reality that are initially experienced as alien or ‘other’. Augmenting Buber with an alternative understanding of dialogic space enables us to see how dialogue mediated by technology, as well as dialogue with monologised fragments of technology, can, through education, lead to an expansion of what it means to be human. (shrink)

BackgroundThe international crisis of declining learner wellbeing exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic with its devastating effects on physical health and wellbeing, impels the prioritization of initiatives for specifically enabling academic and personal wellbeing among school learners to ensure autonomous functioning and flourishing in academic and daily life. Research emphasizes the role of self-directed action in fostering wellbeing. However, there is limited research evidence of how self-directed action among school learners could be advanced.AimWe explore the effectiveness of an intervention initiative that (...) exposes teachers to foregrounding Cognitive Education – the explicit and purposeful teaching of thinking skills and dispositions to learners that would advance self-regulated action - to establish the latent potential of the intervention for assisting learners to develop self-regulating abilities that progressively inspires increased self-directed action.MethodWe illuminate the qualitative outcomes of an exploratory pilot study with a heterogeneous group of willing in-service teachers from two public primary schools, one private primary school, and one pre-school in South Africa who received exposure to an 80-h intervention that comprised seven study units. The article delineates the experiences of the teachers concerning their participation in the intervention as reflected in their written reflections, as well as their perceptions about the value of the intervention probed with semi-structured one-on-one interviews after completion of the intervention.ResultsThe findings revealed that exposure to the intervention holds benefits for equipping teachers with teaching strategies to create classroom conditions that nurture the development of thinking skills and dispositions that are important for self-regulating, and ultimately self-directing academic and personal wellbeing.ConclusionCognitive Education is a form of strengths-based education that can play an indispensable role in enabling self-directed academic and personal wellbeing among school learners. (shrink)

This commentary paper reflects on what I have recently learned from being involved in the Editorial Development Group established by the journal EPAT and its owners, the learned society of PESA. Besides disseminating the experience of this group, the paper suggests there is a link between the ideas of ‘netiquette’, the online academy, and the ethics of reviewing.

In recent years new discourses have emerged to inform philosophy and pedagogy in early childhood. These range from various postfoundational perspectives to objectivist accounts such as neuroscience in relation to brain development. Given the variety of competing narratives, the field is complex and multifaceted with potential to revision early childhood pedagogy through varied paradigms and philosophical orientations. This special issue sought scholarship on a range of philosophical perspectives about early childhood education, particularly those related to issues of pedagogy. In this (...) article, we develop an argument for philosophically informed pedagogy to balance some of the psychological and empirical approaches that dominate the field. Based on the provocations of the seven articles that comprise this issue, we argue for greater attention to subjective and even mysterious approaches to learning that call for ontological orientations to pedagogy as a relationship rather than a response or an intervention. (shrink)

This chapter explores the personal and professional obstacles faced by Humanities and Social Science scholars contemplating pre-publication of their scholarly work in an on-line network. Borrowing a theoretical framework from the radical educational theorist Ivan Illich, it also develops the idea that pre-publication networks offer higher education a bottom-up, decentralized alternative to business-modeled e-learning. If learners would only embrace this more anarchical medium, appreciating writing for pre-publication as a process of open-ended discovery rather than product delivery, then the prospect of (...) deinstitutionalizing e-learning could become an exciting new reality. The chapter’s methodology is a combination of normative-theoretical analysis and small sample (n=2) case study based on the author’s personal and professional experiences. While the generalizability (or external validity) of the conclusions is limited, the author hopes to motivate further inquiry into the connection between on-line pre-publication and e-learning. (shrink)