John Quay

In this paper we take as our starting point Greta Thunberg’s message to an audience of adults at a recent climate change summit: ‘This is all wrong. I shouldn’t be up here. I should be back in school on the other side of the ocean. Yet you all come to us young people for hope. How dare you!’ We take Thunberg at her word and endeavour to investigate what is wrong and how it might be wrong. Through this investigation we consider how education may be implicated in the problem to which Thunberg alludes: a problem about both climate change and intergenerational change. We draw upon Hannah Arendt’s seminal work, ‘A Crisis in Education’, to consider how an ecological crisis coincides with an educational crisis symptomatic of an inversion of the traditional adult and child relationship in which education serves to introduce the young to the world – a public world, which is distinct from the ecological world. Arendt’s position on education, we argue, reveals concerns that movements like School Strike for Climate expose young people prematurely to the risks of indoctrination that attend adult, public life, and hinders their renewal of the world. Science too may add to these risks.

The issue of methodology is a fundamental concern for all who engage in educational research. Presenting a series of methodological dialogues between eminent education researchers including Michael Apple, Gert Biesta, Penny Enslin, John Hattie, Nel Noddings, Michael Peters, Richard Pring and Paul Smeyers, this book explores the ways in which they have chosen and developed research methods to style their investigations and frame their arguments. These dialogues address the specialized and technical aspects of conducting educational research, conceptualize the relationship between methodology and theory, and provide in-depth discussion of concerns including falsifiability, openness, interpretation and researcher judgement. Foregrounding the researchers' first-hand experience and knowledge, this book will provide future and current researchers with a deeper comprehension of the place of theory in education research. An illuminating resource for undergraduate and postgraduate researchers alike, Theory and Philosophy in Education Researchconfronts the intricate complexities of conducting education research in a highly engaging and accessible way.

Museum education is a complex and specialized endeavour, even more so when involving partnerships with schools. In this paper, we engage with theories that support understanding of museum-educator pedagogies. Dewey's notion of occupations is explored as offering a better theorization of pedagogical possibilities than that available through ideas associated with identity. Museum-educator pedagogies shape occupations, as the coherence of interest-purpose-meaning. Such shaping is not a purely individual human action, as occupations are social and material, as being-in-the-world. Heidegger's phenomenological understanding of the working of art, critiqued by Schapiro, enables further comprehension of this pedagogical working. Both theories together provide insights into museum-educator pedagogies as expressive of the always challenging art of education.

Dewey’s vision for schooling can perhaps be described as an early positive education, a term now attributed to programmes derived from positive psychology. Positive psychology’s goals for education share many of Dewey’s ideas about community-mindedness and the role of education in nurturing citizenship. Having emerged from positive psychology, however, current programmes under the umbrella of positive education differ in that they are grounded in science rather than philosophy and are sometimes criticised for being morally neutral and individualistic. In this paper, we argue that the work of Dewey may address these challenges by contributing an understanding of the pragmatic connection between philosophy and psychology, as well as a more social view of education through occupations.

Of enduring interest to philosophers of education is the intimate connection Dewey draws between Democracy and Education in this now century-old seminal work. At first glance the connection may appear quite simple, with the two terms commonly combined today as ‘democratic education’. But there is significantly more to Dewey’s connection between democracy and education than ‘democratic education’ suggests. Evidence for this greater depth can be seen in Dewey’s choice of subtitle for his text: an introduction to the philosophy of education. In this article I illuminate some of the further riches Dewey offered to understanding democracy and education, central to which is his theorization of ‘occupations’ as this aligns with his attempts to articulate a ‘coherent theory of experience’. As with democracy and education, the educational import of occupations cannot be captured with a mere combination of terms as in ‘vocational education’. In both cases we are simply appending an adjective to education, which Dewey found problematic. What we need, he argued, is a sense of education ‘pure and simple’ with ‘no qualifying adjectives prefixed’. An existential consideration of occupations enables just that, wherein occupations define the functional unities of life, the character of social groupings, the ways in which growth is arranged. As such they provide us with new ways of conceptualizing the structure of schools and the nature of learning. Here, democracy and education come together in a much more fundamental sense as expressions of life.

Education is inseparable from experience. Consequently, lack of a coherent philosophy of experience amounts to confusion in education. This confusion is evident in the curriculum history of outdoor education, although not only there. Dewey argues that confusion is the major characteristic of the educational situation generally, a situation that spans more than a century and continues today in the contemporary experiences of young people in middle school. Through a combination of participant observation, auto-photography and photo-elicitation in interview, I investigate and analyze these experiences with the support of Dewey’s notion of occupation (as interest) aligned with Heidegger’s being-a-possibility. Both of these contribute to an understanding of the importance of recognizing the who in education, revealing educational confusion from this perspective. These two portrayals of educational confusion (one a curriculum history, the other a contemporary investigation of lived experience), form the first and second strands of this study

In outdoor education discourse the notion of relation is often employed to convey basic connections between humanity and nature as human–nature relationships, yet the sense of relation itself is rarely questioned. Drawing on the work of Peirce and Dewey, I explore the ramifications of a more nuanced understanding of relation, specifically how relation works with and within differing senses of unity. These ramifications have consequences for how we understand human–nature relationships, which I argue are better conveyed in terms of culture–place. The various forms of unity described by Peirce inform more nuanced understandings of culture–place as cultureplace, with implications for the notion of transculturality. My specific concern with outdoor education then enables me to show how cultureplace and culture–place may be considered to have relevance pedagogically, especially in relation to dealing with cultural and environmental crises.

Education, Experience and Existence proposes a new way of understanding education that delves beneath the conflict, confusion and compromise that characterize its long history. At the heart of this new understanding is what John Dewey strove to expound: a coherent theory of experience. Dewey’s reputation as a pragmatist is well known, but where experience is concerned pragmatism is only half the story. The other half is phenomenological, as crafted by Martin Heidegger. Encompassing both is Charles Sanders Peirce, whose philosophy draws pragmatism and phenomenology together in an embrace which enables a truly experiential philosophy to emerge. The book approaches the problem of confusion in education and philosophy by beginning with our most basic understandings of existence. Existence as an interaction is the starting point of modern science, and existence as individuality offers an aesthetic origin, attending to existence as a simple unity. In our contemporary world where scientific ways of thinking are privileged, the aesthetic whole is often overlooked, especially in education. Yet both are connected. A coherent theory of experience is therefore a marriage between phenomenology and pragmatism, enabling each to maintain its position by acknowledging how both are required. The book is divided into three main parts: - confusion in philosophy and education - a coherent theory of experience - a coherent theory of education. Quay suggests that education benefits from such a coherent theory of experience by better comprehending its connection to life. More than just knowing, more than just doing, education is about being. This book will be of interest to philosophers, educators and educational philosophers.

Phenomenology has been with us for many years, and yet grasping phenomenology remains a difficult task. Heidegger, too, experienced this difficulty and devoted much of his teaching to the challenge of working phenomenologically. This article draws on aspects of Heidegger’s commentary in progressing the teaching and learning of phenomenology, especially as this pertains to research in fields such as education. Central to this task is elucidation of what I believe to be the most important feature of phenomenology—what Heidegger referred to as the ‘starting point’ of phenomenology. I have written this article in the manner of a phenomenological workshop with the intention of inviting the reader to engage experientially with this starting point.

In this book we take the reader on a journey through the various curriculum reforms that have emerged in the USA around the idea of conducting education outdoors – through initiatives such as nature-study, camping education, adventure education, environmental education, experiential education and place based education. This is a historical journey with an underlying message for educators, one we are able to illuminate through the educational theories of John Dewey. Central to this message is a deeper understanding of human experience as both aesthetic and reflective, leading to a more coherent comprehension of not just outdoor education, but of education itself.