Conference Agenda

Welcoming Newcomers to ERC

Teaching in today’s dynamic landscape is marked by complexity (Parsons, 2012). With evolving curricula, emerging organisational systems, and escalating demands for continuous adaptation, educators are compelled to constantly assess their professional growth in the realms of learning, teaching, and knowledge (Hammond & Bransford, 2007). Consequently, adaptive expertise has become fundamental to effective teaching (Hatano & Iganaki, 1988; Vogt & Rogalla, 2009). Pedagogical adaptivity entails tailoring lesson assignments to match learners' cognitive levels, facilitating their progression within their zone of proximal development (König et al., 2020), achieved through preplanned or spontaneous adjustments (Beltramo, 2017).

Adaptive teachers are exemplary in their teaching (Soslau, 2012) and possess pedagogical content knowledge that is flexible and creatively employed in instruction (Hattie, 2012). Within this construct teachers use a range of cognitive, motivational strategies, and identity components to adapt their practice (Crawford et al., 2005). However, classrooms present unpredictable landscapes, with students from diverse backgrounds, cultures, and experiences, as well as varying proficiencies, interests, and abilities (Parsons et al., 2018). Adaptive experts prioritise the impact of their methods on these students, seeking new skills and knowledge when their routines prove ineffective (Timperley, 2011), thereby selecting innovative strategies to accommodate diverse contexts (Vagle, 2016). Consequently, pedagogical adaptability is an ongoing, contextual, and multifaceted process (ibid.).

During periods of change, external factors like curricular reform can disrupt a teacher’s pedagogical adaptivity. In such swiftly evolving environments, adaptivity—characterised by flexibility, reflexivity, and innovation—is pivotal for navigating change (Tan et al., 2017).

The scholarly literature suggests that a teacher's disposition is fundamental to their pedagogical adaptivity. The capacity for effective and thoughtful adaptivity is closely intertwined with teachers' beliefs, vision, sense of belonging, and identity (Fairbanks et al., 2010). Fairbanks et al. (2010) delineate a thoughtful adaptive teacher as one possessing both declarative and procedural knowledge, as well as conditional knowledge. They comprehend not only the what and how of teaching but also possess a profound understanding of the most efficacious instructional approaches tailored to the intricate needs of their students (Ankrum et al., 2020; König et al., 2020). When teachers possess a clear awareness of their beliefs, a guiding vision for their practice, a sense of belonging, and can envision identities for both themselves and their students, they are more likely to exhibit thoughtful adaptivity and thereby become more effective educators (Fairbanks et al., 2010).

Through this lens this study adopts an interpretive epistemological stance to investigate the impact of curricular reform at the lower secondary level in Ireland on teachers' vision, beliefs, sense of belonging, and identity, and consequently, how this affects their agentic capacity to use pedagogical adaptivity within a classroom. The research specifically focuses on in-service teachers working within immersive Irish language contexts across the Republic of Ireland. The objective is to explore the pedagogical adaptivity of these teachers, examining their characteristics and assessing how intrinsic and extrinsic factors influence their ability to address the diverse needs of their students during periods of change.

Strong expectations are associated with education in terms of preparing the next generation for social and technological change. Globally, curriculum documents are therefore being reviewed/revised (or developed where they have not yet existed) at the national level. In previous decades, however, curriculum changes were investigated mainly at the school level. My goal is to contribute to knowledge about the meso curriculum making (meso level) and its research reflection – for definition of site of activities in curriculum making see Priestley et al. (2021, p. 13).

The Czech curriculum for primary education and lower secondary education is currently being reviewed, too. In my doctoral research I analyse this process using case study conducted on the meso curriculum making. In continental Europe (as well as in the Czech republic) there is typical to have commissions (or committees) selected by the state which are reviewing national curriculum (Sivesind & Westbury, 2016).

We want to determine causal processes in physics (science education is divided into physics, chemistry and biology in the Czech Republic) subject curriculum committee because these processes appear to be under‑theorized (Dvořák, 2023). That is why we think about our case study “as the opportunity to shed empirical light on some theoretical concepts or principles” (Yin, 2018, p. 38).

Main research question of case study is “How is the process of curriculum review at the meso level in the Czech Republic carried out?”. Some possible theoretical frameworks have been already identified. The theoretical framework is based on curriculum making, which changes the understanding from ‘level’ (e. g. school or teacher) to ‘social practices‘ (e. g. production of resources) (Priestley et al., 2021). Other models describing the process of curriculum making/reviewing include Curriculum Design Coherence Model (Rata, 2021) or Modelling of Curriculum (Hajerová Műllerová & Slavík, 2020). The question arises whether and how are these models being applied.

To expand already found theories and models I have conducted a literature review. In this review I am going to looking for curriculum theories or models used on meso level in reviewing science education (ISCED levels 1–3). My goal is to continue in a work of my colleagues from Charles University in Prague (Žák & Kolář, 2018). They found in primary studies very strong criticism of traditional approach to curriculum. On the other hand, they also identified innovative approaches (e. g. Active Physics) as a reaction on traditional approach.

The main research question of the literature review is “How is the processes of curriculum reviews for primary and secondary science education at the meso level being researched or described recently?”. More specific research questions focus on 1) terminology used to describe processes; 2) theoretical frameworks of researchers; 3) research study designs. According to number of founded studies I will restrict these questions by more criteria.

The theory and theoretical propositions in case studies can be helpful in defining the appropriate research design and data to be collected. Therefore, this literature review aims to find theoretical as well as methodological aspects of studies on curriculum reviews. Based on these findings I can better develop propositions (“qualitative hypotheses”) to be examined through the case study. At the same time, I want to contribute to discovering the terminology related to curriculum reviewing/making, which appears to be inconsistent.

The adoption of Active Methodologies (AM) in higher education is strongly recommended for preparing students to live and work in the 21st century (Michael, 2006). In this sense, the European University Association (2019) indicates that promoting active learning in universities is fundamental, given the role of these institutions in training critical, creative and collaborative citizens and professionals, capable of contributing to a complex and ever-changing world. Active learning should therefore be part of universities' strategies to fulfil their social mission and promote education geared towards sustainable development. In addition, various studies have shown that student-centred teaching approaches are more effective than passive, teacher-centred teaching approaches (Freeman et al., 2014; Hsieh, 2013; Michael, 2006).

Active learning consists of involving students in activities that encourage them to reflect on ideas and how they are applied when speaking, listening, writing, reading and/or reflecting (Hsieh, 2013; Michael, 2006). It also implies students being consciously involved in the process of constructing, testing and refining their mental models while dealing with problems, challenges or concepts in a particular discipline (Freeman et al., 2014; Michael, 2006). From this perspective, teachers are charged with acting as facilitators or mediators of learning and students present a participatory and central role in the pedagogical process.

This understanding has led universities to invest in the development of learning environments that support the adoption of Active Methodologies. In this sense, Flexible Learning Spaces (FLS) have emerged, i.e. innovative environments intentionally designed to promote the implementation of AM and collaborative pedagogical approaches (Van Horne & Murniati, 2016). Corroborating this definition, the authors Li et al. (2019) understand these spaces to be physical classrooms geared towards the development of active learning processes, in combination with advanced forms of educational technology and flexible furniture, to provide personalised and dialogical learning experiences.

This situation makes the implementation of FLS widely indicated and considered as one of the main trends in technological strategies to be adopted in higher education currently (European University Association, 2019). This orientation has led several Portuguese universities to invest in FLS in recent years. Given this scenario, there is a need to train university teachers to work in these spaces. This is because the structuring of Flexible Learning Spaces alone is not enough to guarantee the implementation of pedagogical practices centred on students' active learning. The teaching and learning process needs to be explicitly geared towards taking advantage of the pedagogical potential of the space (Becker et al., 2018). Furthermore, different studies have reported barriers faced by professors in the use of FLS, which may have an impact on their choice to continue using transmissive teaching methods or even choose not to adopt this type of space in their work (MacLeod et al., 2018; Van Horne & Murniati, 2016; Wetzel & Farrow, 2023).

The aim of this research is therefore to develop, implement and evaluate a training model for higher education teachers that promotes the critical and reflective adoption of Active Methodologies in Flexible Learning Spaces. To this end, the first phase of the research sought to identify and systematise the training principles that should guide this model, based on the following research questions:

Q1. What assumptions should guide the training of higher education teachers to adopt Active Methodologies in their classes?

Q2. When specifically considering the implementation of Active Methodologies in Flexible Learning Spaces, what premises should guide the training processes for higher education teachers in these spaces?

There is an abundance of studies showing that even when educational selection processes are “meritocratically” set up (e.g. standardised, based on achievement), a student’s socioeconomic background still influences the track or stream a student is allocated to (Mijs, 2016, p.18). Yet, there are few studies (e.g. Spruyt, 2015) looking at the way in which people perceive the fairness of educational opportunities. Access to educational opportunities can be conceptualised as “fairness capital”, made out of dimensions related to both societal and personal circumstances (Thomas, 2021).

This article investigates the way in which people educated in different types of educational systems perceive the fairness of educational opportunities in their countries. Thus, this research addresses the following question: How do people with different education levels from Germany and Romania perceive the fairness of educational opportunities in their countries?

Using data from round 9 of the European Social Survey, I look at perceptions of fairness regarding educational opportunities in Germany and Romania. Romania and Germany were selected because they belong to different educational regimes (Dumas et al., 2013). In Germany, there is a relatively strong link between educational qualifications and labour market positions (Allmendinger, 1989), although there are also large social background effects on track allocation in secondary school (Skopek & Leopold, 2020). Inequality has increased in Germany since the beginning of the 2000s, which has been accompanied by a rising share of affluent individuals who believe their society is unfair (Sachweh and Sthamer, 2019). Romania is a post-socialist country that has recently experienced growing levels of inequality, currently being one of the most unequal countries in the EU in terms of income disparities (Precupetu, 2013).

This article explores individuals’ perceptions about the fairness of opportunities for everyone in their country to assess the level of legitimacy attributed to educational systems in Germany and Romania. Moreover, the paper investigates how individuals perceive their own opportunities relative to others in their country, with the aim to infer the satisfaction levels of individuals with different education levels regarding their relative chances to gain the education level sought.

Empirically, research is inconclusive on how education level affects perceptions of meritocracy (Duru-Bellat & Tenret, 2012). Therefore, Mijs (2016) warns that the approach to studying meritocratic beliefs in terms of (universal) human psychology is rather narrow. Instead, he suggests that researchers should explore how different institutional configurations contribute to shaping individuals’ perceptions of meritocracy. Research by Lavrijsen and Nicaise (2016) suggests that opinions about the fairness of opportunities differ significantly between countries. Cross-national variation in perceptions of fairness might be explained by differences in the structure of opportunities in different countries, and the visibility of unfair (dis)advantages.

The visibility of educational privilege could be influenced by the forms of capital that constitute educational privilege. Bourdieu and Passeron (1977) argue that privilege is mostly noticed in its crudest forms, as help with schoolwork, but the essential part of cultural capital is passed on more discretely. Their work talks about the visibility of privilege to external observers, but does not touch on individuals’ awareness of their own privilege. This paper will look at people’s perceptions of their own privilege, as well as the extent to which they evaluate opportunities for other people in their countries as fair.

In order to identify barriers that stand in the way of a fair distribution of educational opportunities, this paper focuses on the opinions of elite students from Germany and Romania. Based on semi-structured interviews, this paper will further answer the question: How do elite students from Germany and Romania conceptualise educational privilege and the barriers to fairly rewarding talent and effort in their countries?

The following paper uses an autoethnographic method to investigate current teacher practice in schools. It narrativises my experience as a high school teacher and illuminates the fragmentary and diminishing spaces for teacher- produced professionalism in education.

The work of teachers in schools has suffered from “the rise of top-down prescription of both the content and form of education” (Biesta, 2020a, p. 72) restricting our professional autonomy - our daily practices defined by measurement of externally-imposed outcomes. The impact of technicist measurement regimes has led to a degradation of the important role of teachers, catalysing a crisis in attracting people to teaching, and misguided descriptions of ‘teacher burnout’ (Santoro, 2019). I discuss Ball’s description of “exteriorisation” (Ball, 2003, p. 226, see Lyotard, 1984 : 4) to external pressures, resulting in a palpable intensification in teachers’ working lives. The intention of this paper is to exemplify and interrogate the daily work of teachers and draw attention to the concomitant problem of retaining teachers in our ‘profession’ (in Australia our professions remains defined by others through externally-imposed standards). I draw on three decades of work as a practising English teacher in secondary schools in New South Wales, Australia to explore the paradigm that reduces individual teacher judgement and professionalism and encourages a sense of ‘demoralisation’ (Santoro, 2019) about my/our work.

Common narratives exist of ‘teachers do a wonderful job’, but… ‘they also need to prepare students for an unknown future, improve standardised testing results, focus on student-centred learning, teach online for ‘asynchronous learning’, teach to demonstrate ‘competency’ in achieving outcomes, track student data for school improvement…’. The list goes on and on, highlighting a confusing and disturbing melange of disparate and externally-imposed purposes.

In this paper, I tell a story about the tensions between externally-imposed factors and teacher professionalism and artistry. ‘Artistry’ should be endemic to teaching practice and involves making situational, pedagogical decisions in response to uncertain or unexpected moments in the classroom. This differs substantially to the current discourse of teacher ‘competency’ or ‘proficiency’, which reduces teacher artistry/practice to the fulfilment and measurement of outcomes and often stifles artistry/creativity in drawing out ‘subjectifying’ experiences. I draw on Gert Biesta’s writing, as his work focuses on the rediscovering the importance of teaching, particularly in the subjectification domain of educational purpose. Subjectification relates to the “subjectivity or subject-ness of those we educate”, (Biesta, 2013, p. 4) becoming “subjects of action and responsibility”, (Biesta, 2013, p.18), which orientates them towards questions about problems in relation to freedom and emancipation. The other purposes of education, qualification and socialisation, (Biesta, 2013), are overly emphasised in current schooling systems in Australia and other parts of the Anglosphere and the Global North, resulting in a reduction in the importance of teacher virtuosity (Biesta, 2103) and teacher-led professional action. Teaching in the subjectification domain requires freedom in teacher practice to maintain the integrity of education as an educational field, not one colonised by multiple external incursions.

Schools should be places of ‘freedom’ for students, providing ‘free time’ and the “space to leave their own known environment, rise above themselves and renew (and thus change in unpredictable ways) the world” (Masschelein & Simons, 2013, p. 9-10). Without this ‘renewal’, Biesta (2013) argues that education and democracy are at risk.

My paper highlights the extent to which teacher professionalism has been hindered as our practices are inflected by discourses of accountability and performativity, the antithesis to Biesta’s ideas about education. Referring to Biesta’s more recent work, I further consider how I navigate the contemporary classroom and varied school systems and attempt to maintain a sense of purpose in my work.

The following is my proposal for a PhD research project. I am looking to present this project in hopes of receiving feedback on my research design.

While universities increasingly aim to address the contemporary crises faced by society, it is critical educators who contextualize such crises as structural and help students engage with these structures. The demand for critical education is more pressing than ever, yet the struggles such educators face in the classroom are often unaddressed. To teach a course on capitalism, white-supremacy and patriarchy means to create both personal and interpersonal tensions in your classroom. Students arguing with each other, students arguing with the lecturer, frustration, expectation, disappointment and sometimes even anger are par for the course of critical education. The point is not that ‘regular’ education does not encounter its own set of tensions, such as neoliberal policy forcing the instrumentalization of higher education, but that critical educators experience an added set of tensions that revolve around their course content and pedagogy. While such tensions are highly visible, sometimes even making the news, they are rarely conceptualized as something structural, as something which educational programs need to account for.

One explanation for such tensions in critical education revolves around the politicization of ‘critical’ topics. The topics addressed by critical educators are politically contentious topics, racism, feminism, the climate crisis, which means there will be divisions and disagreements along people’s political alignment. This explanation covers some of the difficulties critical educators face, allegations of ‘wokeness’ or students who expect certain conclusions from you. However, this explanation fails to explain why these topics become political and therefore fails to explain a range of other tensions encountered in critical education. Another explanation for the tensions in critical education says that critical education arouses anger and other emotions that can derail the classroom (Zembylas, 2007; Harlap, 2014). For example, a student might take offense to the course content and their discontent becomes a stumbling block to continue class. A flaw of this explanation is that it is too broad. Any classroom tension can be classified as related to emotions and it remains unclear why critical education would arouse more emotions than ‘regular’ education. While these explanations are not exhaustive, the struggles facing critical education remain obscure and therefore difficult if not impossible for universities to take account of.

The central questions for my research proposal would then be: how can educational scientists conceptualize the particular struggles facing critical education? What even are the tensions experienced by critical educators? Lastly, how are these tensions related to the structures addressed by critical educators?

Theoretically, to investigate the tensions critical educators experience in university classrooms the project will lean on three concepts. First, I will use Paulo Freire’s understanding of critical education and specifically his concept of ‘the oppressor in us’, second Max Van Manen’s concept of ‘critical reflection’ as the goal for critical education, and third Baxter’s conceptualization of tensions as dialectical and other scholar’s application of dialectical tensions to the classroom setting.

In recent decades, preschools as well as schools and other higher education have been increasingly influenced by international contexts with migration flows, global political actors, and multinational companies. What this has come to mean from a cultural, historical, and educational science perspective is what we study within the interdisciplinary doctoral school Education, Learning and Globalisation, in which I am included within the framework of my doctoral position in ethnology at Södertörn University. The doctoral school has among other focus areas, one of which is intercultural and norm-critical perspectives on preschool, school, and teacher education. It is this area my study connects to by using theoretical inspiration from the political discourse theory (PDT) to seek knowledge of how norms and value conflicts in the wake of migration and global political discourses affect the interpretation and implementation of the Swedish preschool's social mission.

The purpose of the thesis is to empirically examine how the construction of the subject position of a preschool teacher takes place in preschool teacher education in relation to the norm and value conflicts, contradictions, and dissonances that may arise while practicing this position. What drives people to work in preschools and what are their initial conceptions of the preschool teacher role and the preschool mission when entering the education? How does the understanding of the social mission of future preschool teachers change during the course of the education and what are the discourses that create this change? What ambiguities and dissonances emerge between different values and norms within the preschool assignment, and what consequences does this have for future preschool teachers during their internship periods? What intercultural tensions and conflicts of norms and values arise in the encounter between divergent discourses and perceptions of the preschool mission in everyday preschool life, and how are these experienced and handled by future preschool teachers during their internship periods?

I intend to use political discourse theory as my theoretical approach, especially as developed by Chantal Mouffe (2008). Pre-school education is to a considerable extent about the fosterage of democracy, and there is a long tradition of assigning children the role of ‘political utopia bearers’; not infrequently, children are regarded as ‘promises of a better future’ (Dolk 2013:114; Hörnfeldt 2009:14). Nevertheless, preschool teacher students often have problems answering exam questions about how the preschool mission is political. In her book On the Political (Mouffe 2008), Mouffe worries about democracy in relation to our inability to think politically. The reason for this inability is our delusion that there is such a thing as consensus, based on 'common sense' and universal consensus solutions. Is the preschool mission and its values an example of such a delusion? Mouffe completely dismisses the idea that it would be possible to ever reach a complete consensus, as the notion of such is a chimera: consensus is always based on exclusionary practices. Consensus is nothing but ‘the result of a hegemonic articulation’ (Laclau och Mouffe 2001:xviii). According to Mouffe, there are always groups and individuals who do not feel included in such supposedly universal consensual solutions (Mouffe 2008).

We live in a critical ecological moment. We face unstable climates, intensifying environmental disasters, and escalating extinction rates, all of which threaten the survival of a vast array of species, including humans (Tsing et al. 2017). A significant shift in the way in which humans interact with the world is urgently needed (Taylor et al. 2020).

This paper contributes to the body of work that approaches such a shift through Environmental Education (EE), helping us to imagine ways we might learn to live sustainably. I propose that an exploration of how we understand our relationship with the world through embodied creative activities could help us consider ourselves as ‘entangled’ in the world’s interconnected and affective state of becoming - knowing that our actions and futures are constantly engaged in relation with all else. I explore ways we can apply the concepts of ‘entanglement’ and ‘relationality’ to the process of learning, suggesting that an understanding of the world through these concepts could encourage mindset shifts towards sustainability. The goal of this paper is to explore a pedagogy for an onto-epistemology of relationality, with the hope of helping schools nurture mindsets capable of learning to live sustainably in a changing climate.

A global approach is needed to face the international climate crisis and a large proportion of EE research currently stems from Europe and the Global North. Much of current EE in Western Europe is predominantly focussed on scientific knowledge transmission about climate change and conservation. It perpetuates ideas of human exceptionalism by separating human activity from ‘nature’, teaching about the environment rather than acknowledging how we live within it (Dunlop & Rushton 2022). This has resulted in inadequate pedagogic practices to address the challenges of the current environmental crisis (Taylor et al. 2020).

My research grows from the idea that there is a link between ineffective EE practices and the compartmentalised learning necessitated by Western European education systems. Secondary school learning is a very structured operation, it is characterised by the study of different subjects which require different books and often different teachers with little acknowledgment of the relationality of the experience. My suggestion is that the absence of relational learning is complicit in the justification of the exploitation and destruction of multi-species ecologies that have caused the current climate crisis. To address this, we need to diversify the epistemologies with which we engage in order to facilitate research into effective EE (Blaser and Cadena 2018). Combining EE with global ideologies of entanglement and relationality through arts-based approaches will diversify approaches to EE by helping us to explore ways of learning that enable us to understand our relationship with/in it. Understanding ourselves as entangled entities, deconstructing human exceptionalism, and resisting anthropocentric philosophies is the imagining required to live within a changing world (Haraway 2016).

This paper outlines my experience of working with a secondary school in the UK to explore ways of knowing as curricula to approach EE. I collaborate with a small group of students to creatively explore their learning experience through a series of school based workshops. We use drama and storytelling approaches (Burrows and O’Sullivan 2019) to consider their whole school experience, exploring how learning itself can be relational.

My research is framed around these lines of inquiry:

• What are the relationships of a compartmental pedagogy with the climate crisis?

• In what ways might arts-based approaches to storytelling support an understanding of entanglement through relational pedagogy?

• What is relational pedagogy and how can school learning engage with it?

• In what ways can schools facilitate beyond-anthropocentric ways of being in the world that embody an understanding of relationality?

Teachers in Cyprus have been traditionally appointed to public schools through the appointment system of ‘Epetirida’ (Yearbook), which put candidates in a chronological waiting list ordering the mainly on their year of graduation. However, since the 1980s, there have been several discussions around the qualification of teachers appointed to public schools. Also the number of teacher candidates in the Yearbook was large in relation to the appointment needs of the state, resulting in most of them waiting for many years (even decades) until their appointment. In this context, and after a series of negotiations between different stakeholders, the appointment system changed. More particularly, the New Appointment System in Education (NASE), was legislated in 2015 and has been implemented from 2017 onwards. In this study the NASE is theorized as a governmental technology through which the state regulates and controls the teachers who want to work in public schools. This paper argues that the NASE is a governmental technology mobilized by the state to choose a particular kind of teachers as professionals for public education. In this way, the state can govern education and its teachers, since as Foucault (2012) points out governance, for a certain historic period, was aimed exclusively at the prosperity of the state, subjecting teachers to the ideas of the state about education. Moreover, in this paper the body is theorized as a surface on which events are recorded and the subject is created by sacrificing the body (Butler, 2009). It is argued that NASE governs teachers to shape them as ideal subjects by transforming them into submissive bodies. More specifically, the teachers who expect to be appointed to the public education have to conform to the requirements of NASE. The purpose of this paper is to trace the emergence of a new type of an ‘ideal’ professional subject: the primary school teacher who can succeed in this specific recruitment system, including its written examinations. NASE changed the way teachers were appointed in the public sector, introducing additional criteria and written examination processes of teacher selection by the state. These criteria and processes mark an increase in the regulation and control by the state of the knowledge, qualification, and nature of professionalism anticipated by the ‘ideal’ teachers.

Within this governmental technology, the written examination formulates a specific technique, since NASE requires passing a written examination by candidate teachers (who need to be university graduates to be eligible for the exam) before they can be considered for appointment to public schools. Primary teachers are tested on the official school curriculum of two subject-areas (Greek Language and Mathematics); on General Didactic Skills; and on their Knowledge of the Greek Language; the last two components are required for all candidates). Those candidates who pass the exam, can enter a new waiting list (per level of education), in which they are ranked along other criteria: their first Degree’s GPA (8%), additional qualification (e.g. Master degree/Phd 9%), professional experience in education (20%), graduation year (10%) and military service (3%). The written examination is conducted every two years and any teacher planning to take it has to declare their interest and later pay a fee. Four examination procedures have been conducted since the introduction of the NASE in 2015. Before each examination, the examinable content is provided, for every level of education, subject-area and educational specialty and provides general information to the candidates regarding anything new about the legislation, or the procedure they have to follow, through a web-site dedicated to NASE. In a similar way, after every examination procedure the solutions to the tests and the results are shared.

Education is a fundamental element of our society and accompanies every person

from the very beginning and spans the entire lifespan. It is a potential opportunity for integration for all levels of society with all its diversity. It aims to promote participation in society, the development of individual potential, democratization, the development of human capital and human ontogenesis. However, educational processes also harbor the potential for selection and the prevention of developments. Education therefore has a decisive influence on society.

Empirical educational research now provides reliable evidence that individual developments and transitions in the education system as well as in the employment system are significantly and sustainably influenced by the actions and decisions of teachers and thus have an impact on individual life courses as well as on the realization of tasks for society as a whole (Zlatkin-Troitschanskaia et al., 2009).

Teachers are therefore one of the greatest influencing factors on the quality and the corresponding 'outcomes' of the education system (ibid.; Hattie, 2013). For this reason, their professionalism is increasingly being publicly discussed and scientifically investigated. On this basis, validated competence models have been developed (e.g. Baumert & Kunter, 2006), which can depict professional competences in teaching contexts in a structured way.

In times of uncertainty and transformation, however, the question also arises in this context (see current debates in professional society) as to which changes must be considered and which adjustments are considered adequate, which processes this requires and which results (like future skills) should be achieved (e.g. Ehlers, 2020; Stifterverband & McKinsey, 2021; OECD, 2021).

The current crises and transformations in our society (globalization, digitalization, individualization and the climate crisis, among others) are changing educational processes as well as social processes. Specifically, this affects educational participants, all stakeholder groups, the starting conditions and educational goals. If education continues to serve the participation in the (also future) society of its education participants, this goal is also constituted from the crises or transformations of society and the corresponding uncertainty. This fundamental assumption results in a new professional and competence profile for teachers and thus also the need to adapt previously established and validated competence models.

Based on this, three process steps were developed in this doctoral project:

The 1st process step research question is: 'What is sustainable teaching professionalism? For this purpose, previously validated competence models for teaching contexts were expanded with the results of current future skills research (ibid.) and the facets of the structural core of professional action (e.g. Helsper et al. 2000). The result is a profession-oriented competence model for sustainable teaching (Möller, 2023), which is to be tested as a theory-based thesis in a research process.

The 2nd process step research questions are: 'How do groups involved in educational processes describe sustainable teaching professionalism? Which facets are prioritized by which group? What indications can be derived from this for teacher (further) training?

This serves to record the currently perceived competence requirements in the various groups, to compare these on the basis of the competence model (validated by experts), to examine a theory-practice-gap and as a basis for deriving group-specific recommendations for teacher (further) training.

The 3rd process step research question is: 'Which reflection processes contribute to the future-oriented professionalization of teachers?‘

The thesis developed here is based on the assumption that the model developed, with its presentation and description, provides a broader view of the complex structure of a professional ability to act in the teaching context and a deeper understanding of these competence facets and thus stimulates a comprehensive reflection on one's own future-oriented teaching.

There is a consensus about lifelong learning (LLL) being at the centre of a rapidly changing world. The idea is that change happens in “such a frantic pace that […] we all need to be lifelong learners. We need to continually keep our skills sharp and up to date so that we have an edge in all we do” (Laal & Salamati, 2012, p. 1). Luckily, “of course, we all have a natural desire to learn for adapting to change, enriching and fulfilling our lives” (ibid.). European policy has embraced this zeitgeist and developed several strategies towards LLL. However, the concepts of LLL and the associated concepts knowledge economy/society lack clear analytical distinctions, contributing to a conceptual ambiguity (Peters, 2001). This is not merely definitional but shapes and legitimates knowledge (Hughes, 2002). Brine (2006) differentiates between high knowledge-skilled (HKS) individuals, typically graduates, and low knowledge-skilled (LKS) individuals. Brine (2006)also reveals a persistent association between LLL and employability, especially for LKS learners and despite the shift of employment from the first to the fourth aim of LLL, the European Commission continued to prioritise the relationship between LLL and employability in its White Papers (CEC, 2000). The White Papers construct the LKS learner as at risk and the threat, to the knowledge society. The White Papers outline the individualised, pathologised, LKS learner who, unlike the HKS learner, has personal identifiable needs: basic skills (numeracy, literacy, information technology), entrepreneurship and social skills. Those who have not been able, for whatever reason, to acquire the relevant basic skills threshold must be offered continuing opportunities to do so. However often they may have failed to succeed to take up what has been offered so far (CEC, 2000, p. 11). In this sense, Field (2006, p. 114) states that “[l]ifelong learning is actively reproducing inequality.” Field (2006, p. 116) raises four reasons for that: 1) the closure of options for those deemed unskilled; 2) rising general expectations; 3) new politics of poverty and welfare; 4) absence from new learning culture can become a mechanism for legitimating existing inequalities. And so, inequalities in education carry on throughout life even if those who suffer the most from it are often the least aware of it (Becker, 2013; Hadjar, 2008). Because those who have benefited least from educational opportunities in the past are also far the most likely to express little or no wish to return to education in the future (Aldridge, 2005, pp. 15-17). And so, another important aspect of LLL to consider is resistance. Some adults simply have no interest in taking up the so-called opportunities that are on offer (Field, 2006, p. 131). For them, not being a school type can be a positive form of self-identity.

Working out the perception and subsequent coping strategies of this form of inequality and/or resistance is the aim of this research. The focus of this project is on the relationship between educational and job-related experiences and the resulting attitudes towards LLL. This relationship describes the exercise, production, and accumulation of knowledge and cannot be dissociated from the power mechanisms with which they maintain complex relations (Foucault, 1994, p. 291). This work will therefore analyse how the LLL discourse, including societal expectations and exclusion, affect people whose lives are shaped by educational inequality. The research question is:

What patterns of perception, interpretation and potential coping strategies are evident in people who suffer from educational inequality regarding the perceived pressure coming from LLL discourse?

There is a growing interest in conducting Systematic Reviews in education for both research purposes and evidence-based policy making. Education research is a critical domain that grants us valuable insights into the intricate processes of learning and teaching. Within this dynamic field, researchers employ a diverse array of methods and approaches to investigate a wide spectrum of educational facets, ranging from the dynamics of classroom environments and teacher-student interactions to the far-reaching consequences of education policies and practices on student outcomes (Creswell & Poth, 2019).

Typically, education research is categorized into two overarching paradigms: qualitative and quantitative research. However, it's worth noting that mixed-method research occupies a distinctive paradigm of its own. This comprehensive approach brings with it unique foundational perspectives on social reality and research, distinct ontological and epistemological viewpoints, and a set of axiologies and methodologies exclusive to its domain.

However, Systematic Reviews synthesising qualitative research evidence still pose theoretical and methodological challenges at all stages of the process (from the formulation of research questions to the evidence claim made by the authors).

In the field of education, the synthesis of qualitative studies within systematic reviews has long been a shared challenge. Education, inherently qualitative in nature, presents a complexity of variables that complicates the calculation of a straightforward combining effect size in meta-analysis (Borenstein, 2009). Moreover, the profound insights into educational settings and perceptions derived from the synthesis of qualitative studies hold immense value. Understanding not just whether a practice was successful, but why it was, offers a deeper perspective. However, the diversity in how qualitative research is conducted and reported poses significant challenges in synthesizing these findings (Sandelowski & Barroso, 2006).

While there's a prevailing belief that qualitative research can be systematically reviewed and synthesized, distinguishing methodically conducted qualitative research from those lacking rigor remains a necessity. Furthermore, a consensus on various aspects of the research process and its reporting still eludes the field (Garside, 2014).

Qualitative systematic reviews in Education provide valuable insights into the characteristics of knowledge claims made within the field. These reviews are designed to synthesize and analyse qualitative research studies to generate comprehensive and nuanced understandings of educational phenomena. The characteristics of knowledge claims in qualitative systematic reviews are distinct and supported by the review authors through rigorous methodology and transparent reporting. Critical reflection on facts and the interpretation of evidence lies at the core of all research, particularly when using research findings to guide policies and practices. Within the context of a systematic review, this process takes on added significance. Here, it is not only essential to deliberate upon the review methodology but also scrutinize the studies that have been incorporated into the review and dissect the resultant findings (Gough et al., 2017). This interconnected triplet – the research question, research methods, and research data – forms the linchpin of constructing knowledge claims within the purview of qualitative systematic reviews in the field of Education. Against this backdrop, this review aims at answering the following research question:

What are the characteristics of the knowledge claims made in qualitative systematic reviews in the field of education and how are they supported by the authors of the reviews?

a) conducting a systematic review of existing systematic reviews of qualitative studies in the education field with a focus on student, teacher and parents’ subjective experiences, beliefs, opinions and attitudes;

b) developing a comprehensive theoretical framework by integrating Toulmin's Argumentation Model and Gough's Claim Appraisal Framework (Gough, 2022; Toulmin, 1958) to identify methodological characteristics and reporting practices of qualitative systematic reviews in the education field.

There is a tradition in our Network where we invite scholars affiliated with or connected to the current location to form a panel to open the Network sessions. We are both delighted and excited to announce that esteemed colleagues Zelia Gregoriou, Marianna Papastephanou, and Michalinos Zembylas have accepted our invitation and will be speaking on the theme of war and education

This paper explores the relationship between race, place and Bildung, specifically the problematics of Black American identity and the troubled concept of America itself, and the fatefully compromised roots of this modern democracy (“We the People!”—but which people are we?). The paper employs works by Ralph Ellison (namely, Invisible Man) and Langston Hughes as an opportunity to think about Bildung, the Bildungsroman and other literary works associated with the struggle that is Bildung as a means to explore different facets of identity, or the ways in which ‘identity’ is showcased in this kind of literature.

It also explores the significance of place for our ‘becoming’ as human beings, and the way that coming into relationship with place is an inherent aspect of education. This relationship being essentially conflicted in the Black American context of the mid- 20^th century. Ideas about place are developed through Heidegger and humanist geographer Edward Relph, who enrich and subvert our understanding of ‘place’ as something that is not only physical or material (i.e. a geographical location) but also ontological and existential; a place becomes a place through patterns of meaning. Additionally, the work is guided by William James Booth’s The Color of Memory, which deals more explicitly with the violence of identity formation in these colonial contexts.

In this paper, we address the question of Bildung and its place in the modern university, especially in relation to teaching and the concept of Didaktik (cf. Sjöström & Tyson, 2022). We are particularly interested in the relation between higher education’s societal and scientific functions as well as in its possibilities for each student to develop intellectually and emotionally, thus increasing their opportunities to live a good life. The main questions that we ask are: What is knowledge, what do we do with it and how can it help us to get ahead and navigate in our lives? With support from Nordic conceptions and interpretations of the concept of Bildung (e.g. Bernt Gustavsson, Michael Uljens, and Sven Nordenbo) as well as some contemporary interpretations of Herbart's concept Bildsamkeit (e.g., Siljander et. al 2012), we discuss how teaching in higher education can be a place where Bildung and knowledge, through the practice of study (Schildermans 2019), lie in the center.

On the one hand, Bildung can be understood as an elitist idea of ​​knowledge as something exclusionary, politicized, and conditioned by power, that is, knowledge as an identity and class marker. On the other hand, and more in line with German and Nordic conceptualizations, Bildung can be seen as a process where the individual subject grows in interaction with different knowledge areas and traditions as well as together with other people. Bildung is a concept that is often contrasted with the concept of education. Bernt Gustavsson (2003) believes that Bildung in its broadest sense is the development process that every person goes through during their life from child to mature person, a process characterized by the dynamic relationship between the familiar and the unfamiliar. In the encounter with the unknown, man is forced to reflect on his own perception of himself and the world (Gustavsson, 2003) and it is in this encounter that humans develop in a continuous movement. While Bildung should be a free and open process, there are always goals, set by society or ourselves, that steer the process in a certain direction. With the modernization of society, the concept of Bildung has come to face new demands, such as meeting the need for constantly renewed living conditions and challenges as well as the need for new expedient and/or meaningful knowledge. However, something that must always be a prerequisite for education to occur at all is that it is based on human activity and creative imagination and has a personal connection (Gustavsson, 2003). In an educational context, the notion of Bildung will always in some way or the other be connected to the practice of teaching, and therefore needs to be understood pedagogically and didactically. From a Didaktik-perspective, grounded in the triadic relationship between teachers, students, and subject-matter, teaching is about showing and sharing something with someone else, with some kind of intention. If in the teaching context we tend to place this something within the framework of a subject, a subject discipline or area, this didactic choice is always both subject-centered and world-centered (Vlieghe & Zamojskij, 2019). While the teacher points to the content, the content points to the world, either by representing a part of the world or by being drawn from the world. As such, the triadic relationship is not limited to teaching, but occurs in all interpersonal contexts that have meaning making, understanding, and interest in relation to a content as a goal.

The new generations will be increasingly called upon with urgency and intensity to manage complex global challenges (Ceruti & Bellusci, 2023; Morin, 2020), among which at least three emerge as priorities: the ecological challenge, the social challenge and the technological challenge.

The first challenge brings to attention the progressive growth of social and economic inequalities and conflicts affecting various parts of the planet (Latouche, 2003; Raworth, 2017). The second challenge is related to the environmental crisis resulting from the indiscriminate exploitation of natural resources by human beings (Almond, Grooten & Petersen, 2020; Lewis & Maslin, 2019). The third challenge is represented by the risks associated with digital disruption and the pervasiveness of Artificial Intelligence in our daily lives (Floridi, 2020, 2017; Mitchell, 2022).

These challenges are without equal not only in terms of their content but also in their scope. They project a scenario of self-annihilation of humanity due to the disastrous impacts of its own activities on the planet and the improper and thoughtless use of increasingly advanced and powerful technologies (De Toni, Marzano & Vianello, 2022; Kolbert, 2014).

In order to the new generations to deal with these challenges and prevent their potential "destructive" consequences, they need to be educated to acquire a specific type of skills: critical-creative skills (Maccarini, 2021; UNESCO 2021). Indeed, skills with a greater critical component (conscientiousness and sense-making) allow understanding current challenges in their problematic aspects, recognizing potentialities as well (Lee & Qiufan, 2023). Skills with a greater creative component (creativity and openness to experience) enable imagining and charting new trajectories to constructively manage the challenges and guide them ethically and morally (Barone et al., 2014).

The urgency of this education is recognized by studies on the subject at the European level (Cinque, Carretero & Napieral, 2021; Heckman & Kautz, 2017). In this regard, the current theoretical-conceptual overview on critical-creative skills is very diverse. Consider, for example, the Big Five model (OECD, 2014) and the dimensions of conscientiousness and openness to experience. These refer respectively to the ability to embrace changes and the unknown with emotional balance and mental flexibility and the ability to engage with experience in a divergent, curious, creative and open manner. Or think about the Life Skills model (Kennedy et. al, 2014; WHO, 1994) and creativity, understood as the ability to flexibly approach different situations, find solutions and formulate original ideas. Finally, consider the Future Work Skills model (IFTF, 2011) and sense-making, which is the ability to perceive the meaning and understand the deep relationships that connect phenomena and situations, determining one's orientation toward one choice rather than another.

In spite of the fact that critical-creative skills are well-known and widespread in current studies, a closer and more critical examination reveals at least three levels of problematic issues: paradigmatic, content-based, and methodological (Chiosso, 2021; Brush et al., 2022). The first level concerns the paradigms within which critical-creative skills are currently defined and systematized, paradigms that essentially emphasize their functionality with respect to socio-economic needs rather than their significance for the social emancipation of human beings. The second level concerns the flattening of critical-creative skills onto the present and the consequent excessive relevance given to managing problems to be solved immediately, in a logic of the subject's uncritical adaptation and integration into the context. The third level concerns the educational methodology through which skills are promoted in primary schools, where studies highlight weaknesses in terms of effectiveness.

In light of these problems, this paper aims to answer the following question: can the work of John Dewey contribute to the current debate on critical-creative skills, providing meaningful conceptual and methodological insights to overcome current issues?

At a certain point in his work on cinema Gilles Deleuze dramatically exclaims that in today’s world it is no longer the belief in God which is metaphysically most at stake, but the belief in the world itself. Under the sway of neoliberal capitalism, he analyzes, the world is literally sold off in so many prepackaged, reproducible clichés that it has become nearly impossible to believe that there is such a ‘thing’ as a world to be encountered, let alone a common world in which we can still genuinely encounter each other, let alone other-than-human forms of existence. This shocking analysis echoes many concerns of contemporary education and educational theory. If, according to time-honoured understandings, education precisely consists in the possibility of involving new generations in the shaping of a common world, then education seems to be under serious in recent years, when the truth of Deleuze’s analysis has become particularly acute in the confrontation with climate change and other global crises. And while these do not always leave us (and especially the younger generations) unaffected—the ongoing polarization seems proof to the contrary—one may wonder to what extent such affects automatically harbour the necessary imagination to generate new, common beliefs in the world. Fueled primarily by the uncompromising and exclusionary matter-of-factness of modern science (“there is no planet B”), they often appear still very much in need of an education premised on practices of renewed and affirmative ‘worldly’ imagination.

Where Deleuze himself already formulates his critical diagnosis in the context of a wider reflection on the potential emancipatory significance of modern cinema, many scholars in the past decade have thought and written about the educational potentiality of all sorts of aesthetic practices to foster such new imagination. Without wanting to discredit those attempts, we propose to take a step back in our paper, and delve into an interesting and rather unexplored avenue for developing a more fundamental and nuanced understanding of human imagination as generative of belief in a common world. This seems all the more justified in light of the well-known problem of the neoliberal capture of imagination in education, whereby imagination is reduced to a capitalizable skill or utopian image. More specifically we propose a close pedagogical reading of one of the earliest and least read works by Michel Foucault: Dream, Imagination, and Existence (1954). In this introduction to his French translation of Ludwig Binswanger’s existential-psychoanalytic essay Traum und Existenz (1930), Foucault makes the bold and thought-provoking claim that dreaming is the foundational act of imagination (rather than just a variety). By extension, according to Foucault all imagination, c.q., imagination as such, can only be understood through the dream—the analysis of which he believed Binswanger had undertaken in a more compelling, existentially relevant way than Freud (whose notion of wish-fulfillment he largely dismisses).

In this paper, I aim to continue my ongoing dialogue with the Arendtian fifth principle of the Manifesto for a Post-Critical Pedagogy: "From education for citizenship to love for the world." Here, the authors assert that it is imperative "to acknowledge and affirm that there is good in the world that is worth preserving" (Hodgson et al., 2017, p. 19), offering a hopeful recognition of the world. According to Arendt (1961), education entails the intergenerational transmission of what is worthy of preservation in our world. Thus, the essence of education primarily constitutes a conservative endeavour, yet one that must always remain receptive to the unforeseen autonomy of the new generation in determining its course. Each preceding generation hopes that what is valued within the transmitted knowledge will be esteemed and cherished by the succeeding one. However, there remains the perennial question of how the younger generation will respond, both at the collective or communal level and on an individual basis.

I am intrigued by both aspects of the conservation-transformation continuum, which I believe are fundamental to the essence of education: there exists, on one hand, a conservative impulse that drives the older generation to pass on knowledge/culture/habits to the younger generation, while, on the other hand, any legacy (regardless of its nature and perceived value) can always be rejected by the new generation. There are occasions when such rejection may seem like a misstep on the part of the newer generation, making it tempting to attribute blame or perceive an educational failure because the gift of knowledge was refused or contested. However, there are also instances where rejecting what was bestowed upon the new generation is presented as the essence of a truly (transformative) educational experience. In such cases, education seems to succeed precisely because it initiates a life-changing process for the individual that involves rejecting her own traditions and evolving into someone different from what was expected within the confines of a particular tradition.

In past occasions, I have explored scenarios that unfold when circumstances take a downturn, when thing-centred pedagogy (Vlieghe & Zamojski, 2019) is pushed to its limits, when a teacher's profound affection for the world (reflected in curriculum content) is spurned and fundamentally scrutinized; when the intended momentum of transmission fails to materialize as anticipated; when it truly embraces whatever direction the new generation chooses to steer it towards (Thoilliez, 2020; Wortmann & Thoilliez, 2024). But these scenarios depicted instances where the rejection of transmitted knowledge by the new generation was viewed negatively (e.g., the contemporary resurgence of creationist explanations for the origin of human life on Earth versus the more established and scientifically supported theories of evolution). What I would like to explore further now in this paper are other contrasting scenarios, extensively present in contemporary literature, where what appears to be educational is the rejection of what was passed on to the new generation, where the rejection of traditions is depicted as a positive step stemming from the new generation’s improved judgment and their ability to be transformed.

Arguments for and against conceptions of teaching as a science or form of technicism have often focused on the relevance of experimental evidence and issue of purpose in education (Biesta, 2023). However, these debates have largely omitted an analysis of the wider socio-economic context in which education and teaching have been and continue to be significantly shaped and understood. This paper aims to provide this broader contextual analysis, explaining how a technicist logic in schooling and teaching emerged during the Industrial Revolution, how it is being repurposed in light of recent changes and predictions about the world of work, and the importance of reconceiving teaching as a form of artistry.

Systems of mass schooling first emerged in Western Europe following the initial phases of the Industrial Revolution. To meet the imperative of supplying a disciplined industrial workforce the purpose and curriculum of schools focused on preparing students for jobs (Kliebard, 1999). The establishment of mass schooling during the Industrial era led to the consolidation of certain institutional habits, norms, and eventually unspoken rules. By employing standardised ways of organising students into age-based groups, dividing knowledge into separate subjects, using self-contained classrooms with one teacher setting out tasks, and awarding grades as evidence of learning, a logic of schooling and teaching became taken for granted and functions without conscious awareness of it (Tyack & Cuban, 1995). This logic has remained broadly stable for over a century, with teaching innovations tending to fade out or become hybridised within existing structures (Tyack & Cuban, 1995). Sometimes referred to as technicism (Biesta, 2023), the prevailing logic of mass schooling and teaching tends toward the standardised production of specific learning outcomes.

As technologies have advanced and changes have occurred in the world of work, the technicist logic of schooling remains but is shifting focus. New conceptions of the world of work, including one termed the Fourth Industrial Revolution, highlight the growing capacity of artificial intelligence and mobile robotics technologies to perform increasing numbers of routine as well as non-routine job tasks (Frey & Osborne, 2017). Occupations containing more non-routine tasks requiring creativity, social intelligence, and other domain-general skills are thought to be less susceptible to automation (Frey & Osborne, 2017). Proposed educational responses to this predicted new work imperative place less emphasis on specific learning outcomes and instead aim to impart students with general skills and dispositions for learning itself (Doucet et al., 2018). Education policies are increasingly reflecting a repurposed technicist logic directed towards the production of general or meta-level learning outcomes, such as learning-to-learn (OECD, 2019).

Through the ongoing application of a technicist logic, creating conditions for standardisation and predictability, schools and teachers have encountered problems. Similar to the experience of factory workers on a fast moving assembly line, an automaticity and detachment from one’s craft quickly sets in (Shepard, 1977). Rather than fostering a highly conscious, imaginative engagement with the complex unfolding in the classroom, conditions in favour of automaticity leaves the teacher less flexible to respond to the ever-changing circumstances, distinct purposes, and diverse human subjects that characterise educational encounters. Moreover, an emphasis on evidence-based approaches in education policy creates counterproductive outcome expectations based on the misleading assumption that experimentally derived teaching approaches will reliably produce a desired learning outcome (Thomas, 2021). Rather than being an autonomous agent capable of professional judgement, the teacher becomes a technician who administers prescribed interventions (Biesta, 2023). To provide a conceptual remedy to these problems, a typology of artistry in teaching is proposed. This typology includes the art of imaginative observation, art of purposive evocation, art of relational accessibility, and art of contextualised judgement.

The last few decades have seen growing interest in the field of disciplinary aesthetics. Loosely, this can be defined as the ways in which aesthetic judgements, feelings and emotions are expressed or experienced in specific curriculum areas (Wickman et al., 2022). The development of disciplinary aesthetics can be seen as a component of a wider ‘affective turn’ in education: the growing recognition of the importance of affect and emotion as central to educational experience (Zembylas, 2021). The study of aesthetics, while historically rooted in those areas typically affiliated with ‘beauty’, primarily art, drama and the natural world (e.g. Ulrich, 1983), has expanded to explore a broad range of disciplinary subjects including mathematics and science (e.g. Wickman et al., 2022). However, there is currently no substantive research examining the aesthetics of learning about grammar.

Within the broad area of language, aesthetic theory has typically been preoccupied with the forms of or reactions to language: for example, the aesthetic engagement with literary works as a reader (e.g. Stockwell, 2009), or the language of literature in contrast to everyday language, either in general or in the works of ‘great writers’. Analyses also exist of the ways in which some languages or language groups use grammar for aesthetic purposes (e.g. Williams, 2019), and of the individual features of ‘beauty’ in words and/or sounds (e.g. Crystal, 1995). However, there is no work dealing specifically with the aesthetic dimensions of developing explicit knowledge of first language grammar, or of metalinguistic learning in general (which could be about first or other languages). In this paper we therefore consider this area of learning from a disciplinary aesthetics perspective.

Our interest in the aesthetic dimension of learning explicit grammar knowledge arose from our experiences teaching English grammar to student teachers who were preparing to deliver the National Curriculum (DfE, 2013) in primary schools in England. This curriculum contains a significant amount of explicit grammar terminology (e.g. fronted adverbial, prepositional phrase) which primary school teachers are required to teach to pupils aged 5-11. The inclusion of this terminology represented a fairly radical change to education in England after the decline of formal grammar education in the 1960s (Hudson and Walmsley, 2005), and our research initially explored how student teachers might respond to the challenge of mastering (and then teaching) a range of grammatical terms and related concepts that many of them had never encountered. What was most striking to us during this project was the fact that the students expressed strong emotional reactions when learning about the structure of their native grammar. Crucially, many of these reactions seemed to be of a distinctly aesthetic nature.

Within this paper, we speculate as to why the kind of learning that students engaged with within these grammar lessons, might lead to strong affective responses like those that we observed. We argue that explicit grammar learning has a particular potential to evoke aesthetic experience due to its role as a mediator between procedural and declarative knowledge. We suggest that by facilitating the transformation from knowhow to knowledge, grammar learning has the potential to generate cognitive consonance, experienced as an aesthetic-epistemic feeling of fittingness. The analysis draws parallels between the characteristics of grammar and the properties of entities more traditionally conceived to be aesthetic (such as art works and performances). We note that meta-linguistic labels (grammar terms), like art (Consoli, 2014), provide concrete tokens which facilitate virtual models, supporting the transition from ‘automatism’ to ‘conscious reflection’. We conclude by exploring the implications for the field of disciplinary aesthetics and for developing pedagogies which maximise the aesthetic potential of grammar.

Over the last 50-60 years, education theory and research have substantively engaged with the idea of knowledge: what is knowledge, how can it be understood, how important is it and what is its role in education. The 1960s and 1970s brought forward a chief concern of social justice and inequalities in the field of education; a concern which the new sociology of education movement in the 1970s translated into a focus “on the principles of organisation and selection which underlie curricula” (Bell, 1978, p. 13). Within this paradigm, knowledge was viewed as socially constructed as part of a system of control used by those with power. There was nothing inherent in any knowledge taught that made it worthy of being explored in a classroom: rather, any given knowledge belonged to a certain group or culture, and learning it served as an initiation into that group. The evolution of that line of thought led to the idea of the “knowledge of the powerful” that gives dominant groups power over others.

In the decades following, certain education theorists began opposing the idea of viewing knowledge in solely social or historical terms. They viewed that as an eradication of any sort of objectivity, leading to an issue of the curriculum being viewed as “entirely the result of power struggles between groups with competing claims for including and legitimizing their knowledge and excluding that of others” (Young, 2008, p. 28). To that end, Young began to argue that there is a need to “bring knowledge back in” (Young, 2008), and differentiated the idea of “powerful knowledge” from that of the “knowledge of the powerful”. Young’s concern remained with that of social inequality but believed that powerful knowledge itself was a tool that could help overcome inequalities and injustices.

Young theorized that powerful knowledge is specialized, systematic, and different from the everyday knowledge acquired outside of school (Young, 2014), even if the conditions of its creation are social and historical. Further, he held that powerful knowledge can give students cognitive and imaginative powers that they would not have otherwise. Therefore, he argued that students are entitled to get access to that knowledge and the aim of education should be to give students access to powerful knowledge. However, no epistemic grounds were theorized for the existence of such knowledge.

So, this research is structured around two main claims about powerful knowledge: 1) powerful knowledge exists, and 2) all students are entitled to that knowledge. The research is a philosophical engagement with a sociological concept, attempting to answer two main questions:

• What epistemic basis supports the idea of powerful knowledge?

• What implications does the existence of powerful knowledge have for the aims of education?

This research is relevant, as these conversations about knowledge and its role in the curriculum have pervaded both academic and non-academic discourse. For example, in the UK, changes to how knowledge is understood were seen both in academia (e.g. with Michael Young’s publication Bringing Knowledge Back in), and on a governmental level (e.g. with Michael Gove’s heralding of going back-to-basics and change in the National Curriculum in 2013) (Cuthbert and Standish, 2021). In Europe, a shift towards competence-based curricula has been dominant for the last 15-20 years (Leaton Gray et al., 2018), yet the role of knowledge in the curriculum is still a topic of crucial debate (Priestley et al., 2021). As such, a philosophical and epistemological engagement with the idea of powerful knowledge can help clarify the role of knowledge in the curriculum.

Jacques Rancière’s work has been explored and used many times in philosophy of education in the past two decades. Many scholars take The Ignorant Schoolmaster (1991) as a point of departure for their educational philosophical thinking, while others also draw on his work on aesthetic and art (most notably on The Emancipated Spectator) and/or on his political philosophical interventions (see Dissensus and On the Shores of Politics) (Biesta, Bingham, 2010; McDonnell, 2022). His idea of radical equality and of acting under the presupposition of equality has been taken as revolutionary and emancipatory by many in the field of educational philosophy.

In this paper, I wish to explore the images of childhood in Rancière’s work. In doing so, I question the taken for granted idea that Rancière’s work is concerned with education – as an intergenerational matter with children as important subjects. Indeed, if Rancière’s fundamental commitment to equality requires that anyone could be anyone’s equal, there is nonetheless a tendency for children to appear as outside of those who are traditionally understood as equals. In The Ignorant Schoolmaster (1991), emancipatory figures are adults, never children. Even if children are among those who emancipate themselves, they are not represented as emancipating others. In Proletarian Nights (2011), proletarians contrast their identity as workers with theirs and others’ childhood. Education is mainly perceived as an instrument for the realization of utopian movements. In Dissensus (1995), children are only mentioned in relation to Plato’s ideal organization of the city, as those in formation and not as, and for themselves, in the present. In The Philosopher and his Poor (1983), children are also seen through schooling and through the prism of Bourdieu’s determinism. They are mentioned as those who are not yet determined.

Some scholars (Biesta, 2011; Snir, 2023) argue that children can be seen as dissensual subjects. I wish to question this claim by examining thoroughly the tensions and ambiguities within Rancière’s work when it comes to the capacity of children (real or desired) to participate in the emergence of political moments. From this examination, I will engage in a critical discussion on the figure of the child as a potential challenge for the Rancièrian idea of equality.

The aim of this paper is to develop and enrich our understanding of “negative education”, a concept which we coined in a recently published article (XXXX). Negative education refers to the ways in which being deprived of something can itself be educative. This concept emerged out of our experiences of trying to support Teacher Education students during the Covid pandemic when it was not possible to visit and observe students, thus necessitating an alternative approach to supervision involving online conversations between students and tutors. Whilst we originally drew in that article on philosophers such as Heidegger and Levinas to forge the discussion of negative education, one of the aims of this paper is to introduce another new sensibility, found in Ranciere’s The Ignorant Schoolmaster, to explore the value and usefulness of the concept.

Before turning to Ranciere it might be helpful to briefly indicate how our earlier study portrays negative education. We describe two dimensions of negative education. The first relates to the ways in which being unable to see students teach and meet with them deepened our appreciation of how classroom teaching is a thoroughly embodied activity, Drawing on Heidegger (1962) and Practice Theory (Reckwitz, 2002), we considered the variety of ways in which the embodied practice of teaching has yet to become ready-to-hand for our students and is still developing as a routinized bodily activity. Students are in the process (hopefully?) of developing the “regular, skilful performance” of teaching. Equipment has often, at this stage, not been absorbed into the teacher’s identity, into their being. On this account, not being able to see one’s students teach seems wholly problematic as one is unable to talk to these areas. However, we came to feel that this form of negative education may be troublingly nostalgic. Absence and deprivation can be maleducative—just as they might enrich or deepen our understanding of something they can also produce an unhealthy fetishization of how things “were” and will be again. As Reckwitz notes: “The conclusion: if practices are the site of the social, then routinized bodily performances are the site of the social and—so to speak—of “social order”. [2002]. Perhaps the deepening understanding helps conserve teaching “as it was” in its visible orderliness (ibid) without considering the ways in which certain embodied practices may have questionable aspects related to the exercise of power. This brings us to the second dimension of negative education. Here, we came to explore the affordances of absence and deprivation. One such affordance was that being unable to see our students teach meant that we had to urge them to describe what happened, leading us to see it, at least to some degree, as they saw it. This engendered trust and the necessary suspension of scepticism regarding the efficacy of what they said. Certain limitations imposed by technology seemed to serve a similar purpose. The difficulties of interrupting students whilst on zoom facilitated a greater exposure to how our students saw things. Moreover, techniques available in situations of close spatial proximity, which may do violence to the other (Levinas, 1961) were denied us. It is impossible in such meetings to look the other in the eye. The resulting shared vulnerability is perhaps one of the factors that made online professional conversations so rich and served to strengthen a sense of greater equality within relationships.

(As the piece is a work of philosophy of education, the next section will extend the abstract)