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This paper will evaluate a range of humanist and posthumanist ethical positions as useful bases for environmental education. It will conclude that a range of such positions can be seen as embracing respect for non-human nature. Therefore, environmental education can effectively embrace ethical pluralism to some extent. Embracing a degree of pluralism potentially makes it easier for teachers and students with a wide range of preconceptions to become more pro-environmental, while highly committed and exclusive approaches can prove divisive. However, some humanist and posthumanist positions are grounded in dismissive or reductive attitudes to non-human nature. In summary, there is no one suitable ethical basis for environmental education in the humanist and non-humanist traditions, but several. However, the key to the effectiveness of any of these is full acceptance that human and non-human flourishing are integrally related, and that non-human nature must therefore be both respected (that is, both admired and cared for), and not merely when this meets short-term instrumental human goals.

Colin Koopman identifies a longstanding tension between experiential givenism and linguisticism in forms of pragmatism, and offers semiotics as a candidate for resolving this. In this paper, I offer a pansemiotic account that construes the universe as events, and experience as implication in events. This process account resonates strongly with most of Koopman's aspirations for transitionalist pragmatism, but with one notable exception: it is strongly post-humanist. The argument is in three stages. The first sketches out a semiotic process metaphysics that construes the sign as ubiquitous and evolutionary (qua Peirce) and as deferred (qua Derrida) and also as non-quantifiable (thus addressing another problem besetting modern philosophy: mathematisation, cf. scientisation), while denying raw quality (contra Peirce) and the primacy of language in any form (contra Derrida). The second stage fleshes out this anti-Cartesian world picture in terms of its inherent transitionalism, implicit meliorism and inevitable post-humanism. The nature and role of the human on this account is considered briefly. The final stage considers the semiotics of the encounter on this account, and concludes with some thoughts about the teaching-and-learning encounter, taken as emblematic of the human role in taking things forward through explicitly social interaction. Such encounters can only be evaluated contextually, with respect to contestable considerations of significance and of progress.

This paper explores the influences of design on the perceptions and actions of students and teachers at four UK secondary schools. Typical post occupancy evaluations focus on environmental issues such as acoustics, lighting and temperature, using predominantly quantitative methods that often fail to explore how different environmental and social factors interact dynamically with users through time. There is also a lack of attention to the ways in which the processes of occupation may shape the experience of such spaces. This paper reports on one area of a wider study that involved case study profiling to document a range of key issues experienced by teachers and students at each of these schools, thus extending previous evidence on the ways in which habitation alters or rejects original design. These findings contribute to the development of a more holistic understanding of the ways in which design may contribute to processes of pedagogic transformation.

Primary and secondary school teachers in the London area discuss their understanding and operationalising of the concept of ability as applied to their students. Combining elements of achievement and potential, 'ability' is not clearly and consistently defined by teachers and is, strictly speaking, not a necessary concept since other terms account for all its apparent dimensions. Nevertheless, teachers, with some exceptions, employ 'ability' as a central working concept. Teachers' working conceptions of 'ability' and 'effort' seem to be key to understanding the within-school semiotic code, whereby messages are largely passed from teachers to students. It is this semiotic code, rather than the policy or academic discourses about schooling, that has most effect on the student experience. Within this context, teachers employ 'ability' in part to keep open a space for their professional judgment that remains protected from the external influences acting on them.

Contemporary thinking is generally based on substance, as opposed to process, metaphysics: in other words, the belief that the world and the universe are best understood in terms of material rather than events. The environment, for example, is conceived of as substantial; nature as a web of interconnected, if often fragile entities. In this tradition, there is also a strong legacy of mind-body dualism: the belief that the (immaterial) human mind acts on the inert and mechanical "body" of nature. Process metaphysics, on the other hand, posits the world as events in which human beings are implicated. This paper adopts a process perspective in attempting to develop a posthumanist approach to education, rooted in the idea of living as semiosis. (Contains 9 notes.)

In this essay, Andrew Stables notes that philosophies such as existentialism, humanism, and environmentalism come in either exploratory or active forms: that is, one can study the nature of existence or the human, or one can ascribe to a way of life in an attempt to improve the world. Among the major influences on active environmentalist thought are (forms of) humanism, socialism, posthumanism, and post- (or pre-)colonialism. In many cases, however, such ways of thinking can be as damaging or unsuccessful as they may be ameliorative and successful. The search for an environmentalist Way, Stables maintains, must transcend entrenched binaries, oppositions, and ideologies without lapsing into thoroughgoing antirealism or willfully ignoring current realities. Here, he explores the valuable contributions that Daoist and Buddhist texts and practices have to offer in this search.

This paper aims to explain how semiotics and constructivism can collaborate in an educational epistemology by developing a joint approach to prescientific conceptions. Empirical data and findings of constructivist research are interpreted in the light of Peirce's semiotics. Peirce's semiotics is an anti-psychologistic logic (CP 2.252; CP 4.551; W 8:15; Pietarinen in "Signs of logic," Springer, Dordrecht, 2006; Stjernfelt in "Diagrammatology. An investigation on the borderlines of phenomenology, ontology and semiotics," Springer, Dordrecht, 2007) and relational logic. Constructivism was traditionally developed within psychology and sociology and, therefore, some incompatibilities can be expected between these two schools. While acknowledging the differences, we explain that constructivism and semiotics share the assumption of realism that knowledge can only be developed upon knowledge and, therefore, an epistemological collaboration is possible. The semiotic analysis performed confirms the constructivist results and provides a further insight into the teacher-student relation. Like the constructivist approach, Peirce's doctrine of agapism infers that the personal dimension of teaching must not be ignored. Thus, we argue for the importance of genuine sympathy in teaching attitudes. More broadly, the article also contributes to the development of postmodern humanities. At the end of the modern age, the humanities are passing through a critical period of transformation. There is a growing interest in semiotics and semiotic philosophy in many areas of the humanities. Such a case, on which we draw, is the development of a theoretical semiotic approach to education, namely edusemiotics (Stables and Semetsky, "Pedagogy and edusemiotics: theoretical challenge/practical opportunities," Sense Publishers, Rotterdam, 2015).

This paper attempts to square libertarian principles with the reality of formal education by asking how far we should and can allow people to do as they wish in educational settings. The major focus is on children in schools, as the concept "childhood" "ipso facto" implies restrictions on doing as one wishes, and schools as institutions entail inevitable constraints. Children by definition (however contested) tend to enjoy stronger protection rights but weaker liberty rights than adults. A local preferential calculus (after Bentham's felicific calculus) is developed as a guide for teachers, suggesting wishes should be granted where feasible and at least welfare neutral. In the case of teachers, employers set the parameters for the feasibility criterion but should also ensure at least welfare neutrality, while students in adult and higher education should be responsible for the feasibility and welfare outcomes of their own choices.