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What is transdisciplinarity? I don’t know, but I do feel that the majority of those writing about it are not willing to jettison their disciplinary positionality to look for something which cannot be realised from what we currently accept as knowledge. Let me be clearer. Transdisciplinarity by its nature transcends inter-, multi- and inter-disciplinarity, for it seeks to resist the epistemological hegemony of disciplines to be the sole arbitrator of the real. Basically, I propose we can’t start from here seeking a new way of knowing and agency without understanding the metaphysics of the new reality (which may or may not somewhere in between being and non-being) which transcends disciplines. In a postdigital reality (Jandric et al. 2018) where we tend to understand and respond to the unleashed power of technology is a Weltanschauung in the terms Heidegger envisioned it in his essay ‘The Question Concerning Technology’ (1977) of where technology rule humanity rather than harnessed to enrich humanity. Like him, we can enhance our being through and with technology but we need to be in control of it. However, first we need to understand why this is important for our notions of being and I suggest we need to think bravely in the terms of that I develop below for of nature of being (see Fuller and Jandric 2019 for a fuller discussion).

Teachers are necessarily free. The present article discusses the dual meaning of this necessity. The first meaning relates to freedom as an inevitable aspect of the actual reality in the classroom (the “is”); the second to teachers’ freedom as the ideal condition, or a prerequisite for optimal teaching (the “ought”). Existentialist philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre argued that human beings are “condemned to be free” and demanded that freedom be considered an imperative value. Philosopher of education Joseph Schwab, who analysed the practical nature of teaching, concluded that teachers make choices every minute in the classroom, and demanded that their autonomy be expanded. This article identifies parallels between these two philosophical moves and suggests complementing features. Sartre adds universal depth to Schwab’s portrait of teachers, proving them to be an extreme expression of the human condition. Schwab provides Sartre’s analysis with concrete validation and practical suggestions for implementation. Combining these two approaches can further establish the importance of teacher autonomy and offer a unique conceptualisation of teacher agency as a partial response to the crisis of education in the postmodern era.

In educational studies, the paradigm war over quantitative and qualitative research approaches has raged for more than half a century. The focus in the late twentieth century was on the distinction between the two approaches, and the motivation was to retain one of the approaches’ supremacy. Since the early twenty-first century, there has been a growing interest in situating in the middle position and combining both approaches into a single study or a series of studies. Despite these signs of progress, when it comes to using the appropriate research approach at the right time, beginner educational researchers remain perplexed. This paper, therefore, provides useful guidelines that facilitate the choice of quantitative, qualitative, or mixed research approaches in educational inquiry. To achieve this objective, this article comprises three distinct and underlying areas of interest, which have been structured into three sections. The first section highlights the distinctions between quantitative and qualitative research approaches. The second section discusses the paradigm views that underpin the choice of a particular research approach. Finally, an effort has been made to determine the appropriate time to opt for any of the research approaches that facilitate successful educational investigations. Since truth and the means used to discover it are both dynamic, it is also essential to foresight innovative approaches to research with distinguishing features of applications to educational research.

This paper explores the general characteristics of the aesthetics of life. Our approach will be in thinking about the aesthetics of life as a domain independent from the realms of ethics and morality. This thesis discusses some of the theoretical debates around those concepts. The notion of ‘pleasure’ in those practices will be discussed as the one that gives shape to ‘the art of life’. Pleasure also makes it possible for a person to perform these practices for a long period of time; what we call the ‘life-long character of the aestheticization of life’. However, this effort endeavors to demonstrate another central theme of this style of life; the individual/social character of those practices is the one that exemplifies ‘the art of life’. Thinking simultaneously about ‘oneself’ and the ‘other’ is the main concept that helps us the most to appreciate these practices. These debates are elaborated further in some case studies that have been researched between 2016 and 2019. These are real examples of peoples’ lived experiences who, in different ways, try to give meaning to their lives by turning their existence into a work of art.

Although the implementation of mindfulness-based interventions (MBIs) in educational contexts appear to have demonstrated some benefits for students and teachers in research studies conducted over the last two decades, there are also those who criticize MBI’s for their instrumental focus. Exploring this debate, this article offers a case for the implementation of a more holistic and integral approach to mindfulness in educational settings. It will draw upon the philosophical legacy of Martin Heidegger and other critical theorists, who contest the dominant framing of neoliberalism and encourage engagement with more systemic perspectives. During this exploration, we examine two polemics: (1) whether mindfulness should be implemented technically or holistically and, (2) whether the focus should be individual and/or collective. The article concludes that although mindfulness may be an efficient ‘self-technology’ to improve certain aspects of individual well-being, it is necessary to challenge this perspective as it promotes a type of ‘iatrogenic effect’. Specifically, it is argued that systemic failure is reframed as individual fallibility via a simplistic focus on well-being that may contradictorily foster appeasement to exploitative conditions. As an alternative, we offer a more integrative version, drawing in particular on the work of Ken Wilber, which proposes systemic as well as individual transformation.

Mathematics teaching in a 21st-century educational context requires a shift to active learning. The shift calls on teachers, and the plans countries need to prepare to make the changes through well-designed teacher professional development programs. ARPA (Spanish acronym for Activating Problem Solving in Classrooms), as a professional development program, with an emphasis on collaborative problem solving, provides opportunities and tools for teachers to enrich their classroom activities in a student-centered manner. This study of 149 in-service teachers evaluates the impact of an ARPA workshop on teachers’ self-efficacy and their tendency to choose student-centered practices. The results show that before participating in the program, even if teachers had believed in their ability to solve problems, they did not consider how to connect this ability with the active student-centered problem-solving practices in their classroom. However, teachers’ self-efficacy in performing problem solving significantly affects the teachers’ report of their student-centered practices after participating in the program. Understanding the relationship between teacher confidence and the quality of their classroom activities is essential for the optimization of the outcomes of any teacher’s professional development.

This article conceptualises higher education as a complex and dynamic set of entangled social, spatial and material practices — enacted, adapted and contested across spaces and technologies as these interact with diverse learners, teachers, curricula and contexts. Using modes of enquiry that start from this inherent complexity and intersecting these with contemporary disability and education studies, I ask how some of the normative social and spatial practices of higher education are being surfaced by the pandemic. Rather than framing Covid-19 as a massive shift from ‘normal’ (face-to-face) to ‘abnormal’ (virtual) delivery modes, I propose that its impact both continues and alters assumptions about what constitutes ‘proper’ university education, and both perpetuates and disrupts what is ‘noticed’, valued and supported in conventional teaching and learning processes. To do this, I will focus on two themes in current HE practices in the UK, as examples of what such an approach can open-up to view. This starts from the already existing tensions, complexities and contradictions as to what should constitute appropriate teacher and student behaviours and settings, and how this ‘normality’ is often being perceived as being lost because of the pandemic. By engaging with existing literature about longer-term patterns of inequalities in access and inclusion across physical and virtual HE learning environments, I hope to show some underlying problems in how student competency is being evidenced in virtual as compared to physical space and some ways the pandemic has exposed the unevenness of diverse student and staff relationships to space, time and technologies and the differential impacts on their educational experiences.

The Covid-19 pandemic has occasioned many epistemic shifts in our lives and work practices, not the least of which has changed the contours of the field of education and learning. While this special issue explores constructions of the postdigital in relation to learning spaces my focus will be exclusively on ‘soundscaping’ nonverbal sounds. Nonverbal sound may include any category of sound removed from speech or lyrics, such as the sound of a voice, instrumental music, or the beeps, buzzes, screams, and silences of human, animal, machine, object, or environmental sound. Soundscaping will refer to intentionally ‘planting,’ designing, or intervening within a landscape of sound. By returning to a framework for evaluating physical classroom spaces, I consider here how planting sound within synchronous video meetings for online learners can offer productive potentials. Furthermore, I argue that to overly rely on the ‘mute’ button or ignore those productive potentials is not only a missed opportunity, but could unintentionally do harm to learners. Finally, I offer some concrete suggestions for ‘planting’ nonverbal sound.

An allegorical thought experiment occurring in a pseudo Huxleyean world in the future is conducted, in which "Euclidean" geometry has been forgotten and can only be retrieved by traversing backward in time, physically and virtually by two protagonists, Alpha and Beta, inspired by the challenge issued by their teacher Aleph 1. In the year 136 A.H (After Huxley, or late twenty-first century of the Common Era), all instruction occurs virtually. Mathematics is the exclusive purview of 0.01% of society (the alphas). The thought experiment leads to the discovery and realization from the two protagonists that Euclidean geometry is possible using sensorimotor functions with tools called a straight edge and compass or simply a rope with knots. As an ode to Aldous Huxley (1894-1963) this article is deliberately in the form of a satirical provocation that examines the interaction of technology with the learning of mathematics in a dystopian future. A prolog explaining the context of the thought experiment along with a coda with implications for the immediate future in the learning of mathematics is made. A glossary with terms unfamiliar to the reader is also provided.

For a long time, philosophers of science have expressed little interest in the so-called demarcation project that occupied the pioneers of their field, and most now concur that terms like “pseudoscience” cannot be defined in any meaningful way. However, recent years have witnessed a revival of philosophical interest in demarcation. In this paper, I argue that, though the demarcation problem of old leads to a dead-end, the concept of pseudoscience is not going away anytime soon, and deserves a fresh look. My approach proposes to naturalize and down-size the concept, anchoring it to real-life doctrines and fields of inquiry. First, I argue against the definite article “the” in “the demarcation problem”, distinguishing between territorial and normative demarcation, and between different failures and shortcomings in science apart from pseudoscience (such as fraudulent or faulty research). Next, I argue that pseudosciences can be fruitfully regarded as simulacra of science, doctrines that are not epistemically warranted but whose proponents try to create the impression that they are. In this element of imitation of mimicry, I argue, lies the clue to their common identity. Despite the huge variety of doctrines gathered under the rubric of “pseudoscience”, and the wide range of defects from which they suffer, pseudosciences all engage in similar strategies to create an impression of epistemic warrant. The indirect, symptomatic approach defended here leads to a general characterization of pseudosciences in all domains of inquiry, and to a useful diagnostic tool.

Facilitators of professional development (PD) for mathematics teachers currently gain increasing attention, as their practices are crucial for the success of spreading mathematics educational ideas and innovations into schools and strengthening the professional expertise of teachers. So far, mainly two components of facilitation have been empirically researched: facilitators’ knowledge resources and facilitation moves. In this paper, we propose to develop a more comprehensive conceptual framework in order to explain facilitators’ practices and underlying decisions. For this purpose, we lift Schoenfeld’s ROG framework for teachers' decision-making (comprising resources, orientations, and goals) to the facilitator level, and add identity as a fourth component to obtain what we call the ROGI framework. We draw on data collected simultaneously in two PD projects for mathematics teachers in Germany and in Israel. Through three cases of facilitation, we illustrate how the adapted ROGI framework helps to understand processes of decision-making made by facilitators during mathematics professional development sessions.

In this paper, I examine deficit talk, utterances that depict students and/or families based on their perceived deficits, in an equity-oriented professional development (PD) setting. Researchers often attribute deficit talk by mathematics teachers (MTs) to their biased beliefs and perceptions. From an interactional approach, namely conversation analysis and discursive psychology, I offer an alternative perspective on how deficit talk is produced in PD interactions. The analysis shows the rhetorical functions of deficit talk, which are designed for MTs to manage their accountability with a range of potential issues and to portray themselves as competent teachers. The analysis also reveals the action-performing nature of deficit talk (e.g., refusing a request) situated in the social interaction. To conclude, this paper suggests that mathematics teacher educators need to attend to the micropolitical nature of deficit talk and their co-participation in the production of deficit talk as they formulate ways to respond to deficit talk in PD interactions.

In Aotearoa New Zealand, undergraduate, professional health courses include social work, nursing, and biosciences courses that focus on learning how to support people with physical, mental, spiritual, and psychosocial/relational health and well-being concerns. Recently, the need for a nuanced understanding of how technologies might extend students’ experiences across and beyond physical classrooms has emerged. Drawing on contemporary ecological perspectives in education, this paper emphasises that design for learning involves a complex web of elements. Anchored in practice theory, the paper uses the analytical lens of the Activity-Centred Analysis and Design (ACAD) framework to explore how tools, tasks, and various social arrangements influence student learning activity. A multiple case study investigated the experiences and insights of five higher education teacher-designers, discussing the relationship between features of course design and their perceived impact on emergent learning activity. Design elements are also discussed in relation to the experience of teacher-designers adapting and transitioning to hybrid environments during Covid-19, whilst working with diverse learners in different contexts and disciplines. Interviews with teacher-designers revealed what they believe contributes to productive learning activity, such as the importance of creating safe learning environments, an overall appreciation for the opportunity to use technology for teaching and learning, and their use of a heutagogical approach, which emphasizes the development of knowledge and skills for teaching in hybrid learning environments. The paper argues for practical and targeted support to acknowledge, encourage, and enhance teacher-designers’ capabilities for transformational use of hybrid learning environments in health education.

I am very grateful to Alex Carruth, Jane Gatley, Neil Levy, Ben Kotzee and Sam Rocha for their penetrating commentaries on different aspects of Children, Religion and the Ethics of Influence (Tillson 2019) In what follows I respond to their insightful suggestions and challenging criticisms.

This paper presents a discussion on a new focus area in mathematics teacher education, namely the mathematics teacher in shadow education (SE mathematics teacher). It addresses three issues pertaining to SE mathematics teachers: special knowledge and expertise they need to possess, teacher qualification and selection and SE mathematics teacher professional development corresponding, respectively, to necessary specialized expertise. Some perspectives for future teacher education research are also addressed.

From a Levinasian perspective, the interaction between two people is an ethical encounter, a face-to-face interaction that calls the subject into question and renders them vulnerable to the ritual of rupture. But what if your embodiment renders you, in the moment of encounter, less than human? How can we bring the imperative of pre-ontological responsibility to bear on the present moment, fractured as we are in our understandings of embodiment and the hauntings of history? In this paper, I hope to respond to the previous question by articulating the problems and possibilities of Levinas’s thought in conversation with urgent considerations of racially-bodied Others. To begin, I briefly explore critiques of Levinas’s Eurocentrism. Then, drawing on the concept of incarnate historiography, I examine the difficulties of skin as “seen.” Next, I elaborate the prospect of how diachronous time affords a second register that takes seriously the historical experience of pain and oppression as responsibility. Finally, I argue that the recognition of responsibility is essential to education, proposing pedagogy that preserves alterity and makes space for the new.

This article explores a P4C-style of response to criticisms addressed to P4C’s inconsistencies. The main argument against P4C is that, although P4C theory stands for, by, and with children in terms of educational philosophy, P4C advocates do not follow the same approach when they defend P4C theory from criticism. By developing a discussion about listening and education through Megan Laverty’s idea of listening, Jane Roland Martin’s idea of pretending as if listening, and Darren Chetty and Judith Suissa’s idea of misunderstanding as if listening, Kanako W. Ide argues that the central business for P4C advocates with regard to these criticisms is not to respond to them well, but rather to create a suitable educational environment for children to deliberate and discuss them, thereby allowing the adults to extract the children’s wisdom and apply it to this adult-generated problem.

In this paper, I study management and business education in Pakistan to evaluate their suitability for the local context and their compatibility with Islamic philosophy of education. I use decolonial theory and Iqbalian poetry to craft an evaluative lens for management education and to generate an alternative critical discourse grounded in theology. I found that utilitarianism and managerialism taught in the business schools is creating “captive minds” and is not compatible with traditional Pakistani norms and values. I use decolonial theorists’ idea of pluriversality to offer an alternative. In this manner, I contribute to the critical educational philosophy by showing its parochial character. I argue that addressing the legacy of colonialism is important to develop an emancipatory and new way of thinking about education.

What are books? In 2054, where reading and writing have been banned, a scholar in a dystopian academy known as University V might legitimately pose such a question. This article uses speculative fiction as a form of narrative enquiry to explore the socio-materiality of the iconic educational artefact of the textbook. It gives an empirical account of socio-material practices of textbook use (and non-use) gathered from a series of interviews with online distance education students. We analyse these interviews via speculative fiction. We engage in a sense-making activity of the student testimony by narrating their story, via a scholar looking back at our times from a post-literature future. We seek to contribute to a relative dearth of future studies that use real student data. We give an example of how speculative fiction may be used as a form of research method to analyse and interpret such data. In so doing, we seek to cast a light on current educational practices, to show how books and people are entangled. As people, objects and spaces of education intertwine, they call our attention to the interplay of form and function. They decentre the human actor. We attempt to show how form legitimates certain types of knowledge, certain people, indeed people themselves from other non-human actors. We conclude that knowledge is not disembodied, is not stable and is not locked up in books. In our final analysis, we conclude what may seem obviously true, that books are not like people.

Bearing witness is a familiar if diversely employed concept. On the one hand, it concerns the accuracy and validity of practical affairs, for example in a court of law, at a wedding, or in a law office. On the other hand, the term can embody powerful religious, social, and/ or moral meaning, whether in bearing witness to historical trauma and human suffering, or in paying heed to everyday, seemingly ordinary aspects of nature and of human life. In this article, we address the question of what renders a witness trustworthy. We characterize ethical and epistemic constituents of witnessing. We examine the work of several exemplary witnesses: W. G. Sebald, Saidiya Hartman, Jonathan Lear, Etty Hillesum, and John Berger alongside Jean Mohr. These sources help us think about the education of a person who aspires to bear witness, whether it be to traumatic events or to quotidian life in educational or other settings. We present criteria of trustworthiness that can support reflection on what we take to be the important place of bearing witness in educational inquiry and practice.

In response to a recent argument by David Bloor, I argue that denying absolutes does not necessarily lead to relativism, that one can be a fallibilist without being a relativist. At issue are the empirical natural sciences and what might be called “framework relativism”, that is, the idea that there is always a conceptual scheme or set of practices in use, and all observations are theory-laden relative to the framework. My strategy is to look at the elements that define a relativist stance and show where the pragmatic fallibilist disagrees. Defending the pragmatic notion of experience will be central, given that relativists reject the idea that experience can play a role in objectively justifying belief. We can reject all absolutes and start from the premise that everything is historical, contingent, and situated. One of the lessons of pragmatism is that universal and fixed principles are not necessary for objective knowledge.

This study aims to reveal the direct and indirect effects of primary school teachers' educational philosophies on their digital literacy through resistance to change. A cross-sectional research design was used in the current study. Data were collected from 298 primary school teachers working at primary schools located in a city centre in the Mediterranean region of Turkey. The relationships between the variables were tested through the use of the structural equation model. The study results indicated that the teachers' traditional and contemporary educational philosophies did not directly affect their digital literacy levels, but indirectly affected their resistance to change through the level of resistance to change. The results also suggested that teachers' traditional educational philosophies had a negative effect on their digital literacy levels through the mediating role of resistance to change, while the contemporary educational philosophies positively affected their digital literacy levels through resistance to change. Consequently, in recent conditions teachers are expected to develop both their own and students' digital skills. Due to the importance of digital literacy in this age where technology permeates every aspect of life, teachers should accept digital change and transformation without resistance.

The literature highlights differing views on the efficacy of modelling lessons for teacher professional learning. In this study we draw on dissonance theory to discuss lesson modelling that seeks to transcend ‘do as I do’ imitation and provoke teachers’ attention to intended teaching practices: a necessary pre-cursor for changes to practice. A collective case study investigated the experiences and perceptions of 18 practising primary teachers from four school contexts participating in the process of: collectively observing modelling of mathematics lessons in their classrooms, analysing different parts of those practices with the modeller, and enacting them. It was found that modelling lessons associated with inquiry-oriented approaches for developing students’ problem-solving and reasoning in teachers’ own classrooms appeared to confront their assumptions about traditional approaches to teaching and learning mathematics. The teachers’ surprise at their students’ engagement in the challenging learning experiences conflicted with their existing views of teaching and impelled them to reflect on and set goals for improving their practice. Suggestions for pre- and post-lesson protocols for stimulating productive discussions are proposed, along with implications for designing school-based professional learning processes using lesson modelling.

This paper is a contribution to the collective work of imagining better universities. It starts from Raewyn Connell’s account of the good university, and develops four main ideas. Connell’s insistence on thinking about universities as real workplaces, with real workforces doing real work that has real consequences, provides a disciplining foundation. On this basis, we must acknowledge that although changes are often set in motion outside a university, their realisation always depends on the work of university staff and students. Secondly, research on learning and teaching and the spaces in which they unfold can contribute to real change by providing stronger concepts and clearer language in which to imagine, discuss and plan. Thirdly, course and curriculum redesign, oriented to the great challenges that our students will be tackling in the next few decades, would benefit from an infusion of practices and values from the fields of social innovation and participatory design, and that design for social innovation needs a grounding in design justice. Finally, I outline some of the implications that we can infer for better learning spaces — understood from both a postdigital and a postcritical perspective. A connecting theme within this exploration is the realisation of care as thoughtful work.

Historians of philosophy have hitherto either given scant attention to Cournot and Renouvier’s views on scientific revolution, tried to read Kuhn’s concept of scientific revolution back into their works, or did not fully appreciate the extent to which these philosophers were reflecting on the works of their predecessors as well as on developments in mathematics and the sciences. Cournot’s views on cumulative development through revolution resemble Comte’s more than Kuhn’s, and his notion of progressive theoretical simplicity through revolution recalls Whewell’s philosophy of science. Renouvier, far from regarding a scientific revolution as resulting in a new set of conceptual boxes imposing a conformity of thought on the scientific community, recognized that a new theory proposed during a revolution is open to more than one interpretation.

During Covid-19, higher education made an unprecedented entry into the domestic sphere. However, not all students welcomed the emergency delivery of online courses. Consequently, some learners have been developing resistant practices to technology-driven learning, including being on mute and turning off cameras, but these silences, gaps and evasions are difficult to grasp through normative perspectives. Meanwhile, big tech continues to profit significantly from its encroachment on pedagogy. Conversely, we need alternate conceptions of learners’ varying responses to technologies. To develop a novel perspective, the study considers the Middle East’s traditional mashrabiyya windows, which are carved through an elaborate wooden latticework screen of geometric patterns and designed to deflect rather than let in the light. This mashrabiyya structure is applied as a theoretical metaphor to consider Arab women learners’ technological veiled affordances of filters, avatars and not replying. The mashrabiyya feminist postdigital framework develops unique inquiry into learners’ subtle practices; the authors’ self-reflexivity; and analysis of a (silent) email exchange and a Twitter avatar. Theorising suggests silences, invisibilities and disconnection are not necessarily a deficit but refractive responses enabling students and educators to stay below the radar.

This mixed-methods study considers ‘permanent expulsionary punishments’ (PEP) from government schooling. Analysis considers the literature, available PEP data from two jurisdictions, and attitudinal data from Australian staff, in considering the contribution of policy, agency, and discourse (PAD) to the causes of PEP. It compares attitudes in a Queensland sample with those in other Australian jurisdictions. Across Queensland schools, 2007–2014, rates for the two categories of PEP almost doubled and more than quadrupled. This contrasts with neighbouring state, New South Wales (NSW), where the rate of PEP remained constant. PEP may disproportionately impact equity groups, already vulnerable to poor academic, and therefore social mobility, outcomes: especially those of First Nation Heritage (FNH). Thus, pre-identified gaps in educational outcomes for FNH children are stretched, despite this purportedly being a national education and social justice priority. The findings are that discernible differences exist between participants from Queensland, and other jurisdictions. However, despite these differences, responses overall were polarised reasonably uniformly across jurisdictions. Most participants attributed influence onto both family and child with fewer attributions onto schooling systems or PEP itself. Other considered factors which might influence attitudes include cohort differences like gender, age and experience.

The current heated debate on the deteriorating status of the university raises a range of pertinent questions, including: What role can the humanities play in culture today in the face of the crisis of higher education? To answer this question, the authors begin by problematizing the relationship between culture, the humanities, and education. In the second part of the paper, they examine the changing role of the humanities in conjunction with the understandings of culture, and outline three salient ways in which culture is conceived of today. Subsequently, they focus on the loss of the dominant status that culture suffered when everyday life was discovered in modernity. In the third part, they argue that everyday life, or rather social representations of everyday life and its practices, are currently becoming the chief criterion for assessing culture, the humanities, and education. However, everyday life remains complex both in theoretical conceptualizations and in research observations. For example, everyday life harbors a range of risks and anxieties which are veiled by its own obviousness and reinforced by socialization. The authors conclude that, given this, everyday life in democratic societies calls for the work of understanding, support, affirmation, and criticism, in which the humanities can retain their superior status. In the fourth part, the authors discuss non-consensual democracy, critical community, and the pedagogy of asylum as the forms of organization and action that promote an auspicious interconnection of culture, the humanities, and education.

We explore the responses of 26 prospective elementary-school teachers to the claim “1/6.5 is not a fraction” asserted by a hypothetical classroom student. The data comprise scripted dialogues that depict how the participants envisioned a classroom discussion of this claim to evolve, as well as an accompanying commentary where they described their personal understanding of the notion of a fraction. The analysis is presented from the perspective of productive ambiguity, where different types of ambiguity highlight the prospective teachers’ mathematical interpretations and pedagogical choices. In particular, we focus on the ambiguity inherent in the aforementioned unconventional representation and how the teachers reconciled it by invoking various models and interpretations of a fraction. We conclude with a description of how the perspective of productive ambiguity can enrich teacher education and classroom discourse.

This special issue responds to the current discourse on cinema and education from a philosophical point of view. Considering the fact that young people worldwide are watching films and series via their smartphones or personal computers, we here explore the educative aspects of this popular activity. Does this wide-ranging habit mis-educate the next generation? Or does cinema carry a potential for ethical-political education, parallel to the ancient Greek tragedies and the modernist Bildungsroman? The authors of this special issue deliberate this question by exploring the intersection between cinema and philosophy and the potential powers of cinematic education.

This study investigated the middle school preservice mathematics teachers’ conceptualization of what it means for a problem to be mathematically rich and contextually realistic and how their conceptions evolved during a series of professional development activities. Fifteen middle school preservice mathematics teachers were involved in this design-based research. The professional development activities were designed based on L. Shulman and J. Shulman’s (Shulman and Shulman, Journal of Curriculum Studies 36:257–271, 2004) reflective and communal clusters with psychological roots in Schon’s notion of “reflective practitioners” and Vygotsky’s social development theory. These professional development activities were integrated into the methods and field experience courses of the teacher education program. The audio records of the whole group and small group discussions and all written products (i.e., problems, criteria list, and reflection memos) were analyzed to understand preservice teachers’ conceptions. This study revealed that the professional development activities helped preservice teachers produce the problems that would be interesting and encouraging for students to develop their own solution methods. Preservice teachers’ conceptions also evolved in a collective and reflective community. In this respect, this study presented a way to design professional development for teachers that nurtures their understanding of the components supporting mathematical richness and contextual meaningfulness of a problem. Hence, this study provided implications for teacher education practices and future research on mathematics teacher preparation.

Professional learning communities (PLC) have increasingly attracted attention in research on teachers’ professional development. The aim of this study is to identify contradictions that can occur and be manifested in PLCs in mathematics. Identifying contradictions in PLCs are important, as the identification and resolution of contradictions are crucial to developing PLCs. We have conceptualized PLCs and contradictions within the Cultural Historical Activity Theory. Our data consist of two iterations of interviews with four teacher leader coaches with extensive experience of coaching teacher leaders of PLCs in mathematics. The study distinguishes 26 manifestations of contradictions, taking the overall forms of dilemmas and conflicts. Our results can be used in designing PLCs in mathematics: they can be used to make visible and increase participants’ awareness of contradictions involved in PLCs and thereby increase the possibility that the contradictions serve as sources of support rather than obstacles in the development of PLCs in mathematics.

In this study, we investigated the relationship between teachers’ post-instruction noticing (PIN) and the quality of their mathematics instruction. We analyzed the conversations of elementary teachers around five coached lessons and scored their level of post-instruction noticing and the mathematical quality of the instruction of the lesson. We compared teachers’ PIN levels with their instructional quality, using scores from the Mathematical Quality of Instruction (MQI) rubric, for each coached lesson. There was both alignment and discrepancies between the level of PIN and MQI scores. Explorations of the cognitive and psychological constructs that seemed to influence teacher’s noticing showed that mathematical knowledge for teaching (MKT), efficacy, beliefs, emotions, and identity was influential on teachers’ PIN although they seemed to influence teachers differently. In some cases, the constructs appeared to support attentiveness to students’ thinking and in other cases they did not. We discuss implications for professional development and future research on teachers’ noticing.

Philosophy since Nietzsche and Heidegger has been averse to essentialism and considered to be old-fashioned and outmoded in the mainstream flow of debates. And it is often understood that essentialism cannot get along well with freedom and creativity insisted in liberal education. In this article, I discuss three types of essentialism in Edith Stein’s essential strands of thought by explicating the universal structure of human person, the individuality of each person with reference to the inner core of each person, and gender essentialism but always in consonant with the interests of liberal education. Though Stein is an essentialist, I argue that it is the spirit dimension of human person, which she delineates, that enables her to underscore freedom and indeterminism. I attempt to put Stein’s philosophical anthropology in the layout of epistemological and ontological settings paving the way for evolving integral education with huge consideration for her tripartite dimension of human beings namely the psychic, the spiritual and the transcendental.

This is an accepted manuscript of an article published by Springer in Postdigital Science and Education (in press). The accepted version of the publication may differ from the final published version.

Within the space of this collective image/text article, 18 photographic imagemakers and 4 respondents consider deeply and dialogically a quote from William Ayers’ 2016 book Teaching with Conscience in an Imperfect World: An Invitation. The resulting constellation of images and words (1) realizes a space within which works of art, specifically photographs, operate as centers of meaning to generate educational implications, and (2) theorizes a pedagogy that resists unilateral prescriptions and is instead anchored around openness, expansion, and individualization. The paper begins with a few short pieces from Sarah Pfohl, including an overview of Ayers’ book and ideas from writings on progressive education, object-based teaching and learning, and close/slow looking to position works of art as sites of rich meaning. While contemporary schooling often drives toward monolithic, numerical representations of the learners in its care, the article employs postdigital gestures to argue that learners have more in common with works of art than numbers, and thus, attention to artworks can open valuable implications for teaching and learning. The diverse group of images that follow offer an emerging portrait of teaching practice as a set of constantly shifting constellations moving across deep time and space from the intensely specific to the wide. Four texts think more about schools, education, and art. Finally, there is a postscript from Bill Ayers himself.