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There has been a growing tendency to use humanistic and utopian goals in the naming and framing of education policies. The case of the Happiness Education Policy (HEP) in South Korea is illustrative and demonstrates the potential of such framing, combined with references to external authorities, to neutralise domestic opposition and generate support from diverse national stakeholders. The HEP focuses on nurturing 'happy human capital' for the future through education initiatives such as the Free Semester/Year Initiative, character education, STEAM-based curriculum, and software education. Through an analysis of a corpus of policy documents and press releases, this article demonstrates how happiness, as a floating signifier, has been redefined in ways that align and support the different sociotechnical imaginaries envisioned by political regimes over the past decade which depart from its humanistic focus.

This paper argues that the contemporary climate crises we see around our planet correlate with a colonial crisis of (literary) imagination. The author engages with Caribbean literary scholar Sylvia Wynter and other anti-colonial scholars to trace how the colonial literary imagination is rooted in the euro-western humanism and racial capitalism that governs the west, the stories and literary forms that frame it, and whose logics continue to be rehearsed across the disciplines--particularly in English literatures taught in school. The paper then argues that to understand the histories of this crisis of imagination and its link to climate crises, and perhaps paradoxically access literature's speculative potential to imagine different climate futures, literary educators and scholars need to prioritize literatures and literary critiques that are embedded in a different relationship to the imagination and ecology.

In this article, the European digital governance system for vocational and adult education is critically examined in its single technologies and their interaction as well as theoretically reflected regarding potential dangers and opportunities based on the digital humanism and neoliberalism. The single digital technologies are described and critically scrutinised through expert interviews as well as the analysis of central policies, political decisions making (politics) and in the current technological modus operandi (digital polity). Findings reveal that the governance system leans towards progressive neoliberalism, combining forces of emancipation with forces of neoliberalism -- especially regarding inclusion as one of the core dimensions of digital humanism.

Empathy is a fundamental quality that nursing staff should possess, but the empathy ability of nursing students in China is currently at an intermediate level and requires improvement. This study aimed to explore teaching methods for nursing humanistic education, that can improve the empathy ability of nursing students and cultivate high-quality nursing talents. This study employed narrative education and experiential teaching methods to develop empathic competence in teaching pediatric nursing courses. The empathic ability of nursing students was measured using the JSPE-NS scale before and after teaching and was analyzed to refine the teaching reflection theme words. After teaching, nursing students scored higher on the total empathy scale, perspective-taking dimension, and emotional care dimension than before teaching, with statistically significant differences (p < 0.05). Five themes were extracted from the teaching reflection, including emotional empathy, pediatric nursing skills, gratitude to parents, reverence for life, and course experience. The results show that the combination of narrative education and experiential teaching methods applied to pediatric nursing courses effectively improved nursing students' empathy, strengthened their identification with the nursing profession, and promoted the teaching reform of humanistic education in nursing courses. The combination of narrative education and experiential teaching methods can improve the empathic ability of nursing students. This approach is suitable for integrating humanistic education into nursing professional courses and provides a feasible idea for developing humanistic qualities in nurses.

School science curricula habitually encourages students to develop science knowledge alongside 'ethical understanding', the moral theory of right and wrong. Drawing from the ideas of Karen Barad, Donna Haraway and Rosi Braidotti, this paper critically examines the 'science-ethics nexus' in Australian secondary schooling. In doing so, it offers a renewed definition of ethics that negates humanism's anthropocentrism and problematises humanist dualisms by centring a relational world. While posthumanism and new material feminism directly and critically engages with science and ethics, there is limited attention to how it might renew our understanding of these ideas in schools. Thus, the research question driving this study is, "How does posthumanism help renew thinking about the science-ethics nexus in secondary schooling?" A thinking-feeling-doing diffractive practice is utilised to analyse two data sources: the Science and Ethical Understanding streams within the Years 7-10 Australian Curriculum and a speculative short story by the first author, "The Beforetimer." 'Plugging in' concepts of posthumanist ethics and relationality, this alternative methodological approach mobilises the power of diffractive forces to help illuminate how the science-ethics nexus in schools can reproduce onto-epistemological traditions of 'Euro-Western' cultural and masculinist hegemony. This hegemony restricts diverse cultural approaches to understanding the science-ethics nexus by (a) giving credence to reason, as divorced from emotions, and objectivity; (b) defining ethics as separate from knowledge production; and (c) undermining ethical responsibility by merely associating it with specific topics/issues. In contrast, integrating posthumanist ethics in school science requires those implicated to explicitly attend to cultural hegemony and relationality and to place ethics at the centre of knowledge production. Pursuing a posthumanist ethics in science education must do more than critique anthropocentrism/humanism broadly but also interrogate and unsettle this Euro-Western hegemony over diverse ways-of-knowing-being.

How can we build a path from the binary of gender to the unity of common humanity? What kind of difference can the "different voice" of feminism make as a "human voice?" In this article, Naoko Saito argues that the way we talk about the "difference" of a "different voice" needs to be radically transformed. To envision a route to such a transformation, she explores an alternative possibility of feminism in the American transcendentalism of Margaret Fuller and Ralph Waldo Emerson. First, Saito critically examines the politics of recognition and suggests a susceptibility to binary thinking in its approach. Second, as a way of transcending the binary mode of thinking, Saito introduces the humanist feminism of the nineteenth-century American transcendentalist Margaret Fuller. Third, as a way of elucidating the radicality of Fuller's transcendentalist feminism, Saito introduces the feminine voice of two male philosophers -- Ralph Waldo Emerson and Stanley Cavell -- as her conversational partners. By radically converting the way we talk about difference of voice, the transcendentalist feminism of Fuller, Emerson, and Cavell provides a third way that lies beyond the politics of recognition and care ethics. In conclusion, Saito proposes that the cultivation of the feminine subject requires an alternative political education that resists assimilation into political realism. This would realize our common humanity and, in its crossing of divides between men and women, would create democracy from within.

Historical and autobiographical approaches are combined with interviews to analyze the case of the Europa-Kontakt in pre-1989 Poland and West Germany within the framework of Europeanization. The international education encounters exemplify the tendencies to Europeanize, which emerged in both countries despite the Iron Curtain. The painful relationship between Poland and Germany is contrasted with the personal trust and cooperation between Polish and German exchange pioneers since the 1970s. Their pioneering work focused on multinational inclusion, participation, intercultural learning, gifted education, creativity, and building leadership skills. It merged German adaptation of the United States' HighScope model with philosophy of encounters typical of scouting tradition, Janusz Korczak's pedagogy, and Carl Rogers' humanistic psychology, preparing ground for the 1989-2004 European Union enlargement process.

Daisaku Ikeda's humanism (1928-) has made profound global impacts on education and human lives. However, there is little research on analyzing his philosophical dialogues with global scholars. To explore what roles educators play and what value educators can create based on Ikeda's philosophical dialogues on education with scholars across disciplines, the author uses a theme-based approach to code educational issues derived from the dialogues. The majority of the themes highlight the importance of humanity in education. By knowing the roles that educators can fulfill and the values that they can create, the themes identified in Ikeda's philosophical dialogues provide groundwork for the development of humanistic education and can serve as concrete ways to help educators enhance their educational practices in K-12 schools as well as in higher education.

Preparing students to live in an interconnected world is of central importance in 21st century education. Neoliberal educational contexts, however, thwart efforts to implement more humanistic and critical versions of global education (GE). This comparative case study examines how teachers and administrators enact GE at two schools--one public, the other private--in the New York City metropolitan area. Findings demonstrate the constraints and possibilities of engaging GE in neoliberal educational contexts. Implications for GE scholars and practitioners include the study of how wider contextual factors shape GE's enactment in a neoliberal era.

Online counselor education has been studied extensively since its inception, but the experiences of students within these programs have received limited attention. This collaborative view from faculty and students of online counselor education was developed to share the stories of students who have engaged in both synchronous and asynchronous distance counselor education programs at the master's and doctoral level. Students talked about finding online programs to be viable options to work flexibly within their adult lives. In addition, they shared that they were more satisfied when there were efforts to foster connection through synchronous or other means found in a community of inquiry. Finally, their reports illuminate potential directions for research in exploring the experience of students in online counselor education programs.

This article shows how Bertrand Russell and Noam Chomsky's approaches to humanistic education are grounded in the concepts of growth, knowledge, language, freedom, and social justice. Despite their epistemological differences, Russell and Chomsky agree on the need for educating the public to abuses of power. Their own practice of education is a source of inspiration for intellectuals, who wish to counter the current discourse in schools and universities by upholding the value of academic freedom.

The rich mosaic of U.S. demographics contains multiple languages, cultures, and belief systems. Yet, the historical legacy of an old, white supremacist "master narrative" continues to dominate our political, social, and educational systems. The authors of this paper are educators who teach in either K-12 classrooms or at the university level in the graduate education of counselors, teachers, and school administrators. As educators, we recognize that the old master narrative generates discord by emphasizing history that promotes the position and status of one group over another, which is antithetical in a democracy that is supposed to value all. Therefore, the authors challenge the biased and obsolete racist narrative that perpetuates cultural, psychological, educational, and sociological impairment. In addressing the embedded tenets of white supremacy, this article serves several purposes. First, the authors emphasize the need to re-frame how students are educated in both elementary schools and in higher education, urging the adoption of a humanist narrative that includes stories of Euro-Americans from the historical record who resisted white supremacy. It also offers recommendations for eradicating white supremacy across multiple contexts, including implications for the workplace. Further, it provides examples of how this alternative approach promotes positive integration of white Euro-Americans into the greater populace, leading to a more inclusive society.

Over the last several decades, universities around the world have initiated processes of internationalization in an effort to respond to the growing influence of globalization and remain leaders in the vastly competitive space of higher education (Helms, Brajkovic, and Struthers 2017; Knight 2012). Universities have focused their internationalization efforts on student mobility (i.e. the sending and receiving of students to/from foreign destinations while enrolled in a degree program) with the belief that the act of mixing international and domestic students on campuses most effectively, or perhaps most easily, contributes to their missions of educating the next generation of global citizens who are aware and appreciative of the world and its many people, countries, and cultures (Burn 1990; Helms, Brajkovic, and Struthers 2017; Knight 2012). Accompanying the growth of international students has been a rising acknowledgement of the importance of student mobility on US higher education. As a result, there has been a wave of research looking at the impacts of internationalization on students and campuses over the past 15-20 years (Peterson, Briggs, Dreasher, Horner, and Nelson 1999; Ho, Bulman-Fleming, and Mitchell 2003; Urban and Palmer 2014). However, much of this scholarship has been focused on the "outcomes" of such programs, rather than the process of learning that takes place within them. The result has been a relative lack of exploration into international student programs through the lens of educational theory and the types of pedagogy that would best facilitate the objectives of internationalization. In response, this paper puts forth an initial articulation of a pedagogy of student mobility aimed at improving the effectiveness of such programs in fostering humanistic outcomes, such as global engagement, awareness, and understanding. To provide the necessary context for why a pedagogy of student mobility is needed, the author first lays out the benefits that motivate universities to invest in student mobility programs in order better understand the implicit learning outcomes that universities anticipate. Then, the author provides an overview of the areas in which student mobility falls short of these expectations to highlight the need for improvement. Finally, he concludes with an articulate of what a pedagogy of student mobility must look like if the shortcomings of student mobility are to be addressed.

The article presents research into the concept of "personality" in the categorical grid of the consciousness of primary and secondary school teachers. The data obtained demonstrate the presence of an orientation in the teachers' minds and activities towards the implementation of personality-oriented, humanistic models of learning. At the same time, the structure of the concept of "personality" revealed in the pedagogical consciousness is not cognitively complex and holistic. This determines the specific tasks of psychological education to clarify and enrich teachers' perceptions of personality.

Background: This article explores the political impact of using gender neutral pronouns in the university classroom. Aim: We explore how the gender neutral pronoun 'they' denaturalises essentialist models of gender identity. We follow 'they' toward a consideration of the gender neutral pronoun 'it.' 'It' advances -- at the same time that it problematises -- the political project of non-binary communities to denaturalise gender by challenging an anthropocentric model of equal rights. Setting: We examine the latent humanism of pronoun use through our contrasting approaches to gender pronoun use in our writing courses. Methods: First we discuss the role of genderneutral pronouns in building a more inclusive classroom environment for gender non-conforming students. We then consider our respective pedagogical approaches to pronoun use. Andrew avoids pronoun use in the classroom, addressing his students by their first names instead, while Marcos makes pronoun use and gender identity a central part of his course curriculum. We then consider the pronoun 'it' from a posthumanist perspective, arguing that 'it' might help to overcome the violent legacy of humanism by building a more inclusive classroom environment for gender-nonconforming students. Results: The analysis of 'it' as a gender neutral pronoun has revolutionary potential. Deconstructing our conceptions of equal rights from a posthumanist perspective can transform higher education for the better. Conclusion: The article concludes that college educators should consider discussing the significance of the pronoun 'it.' Given its dehumanising potential, this discussion should be presented in light of the posthumanist critique of anthropocentrism, and must affirm students' existing identifications.

This paper discusses creative and critical thinking across wide cultural and historical frameworks. It begins with an exploration of Socratic Dialectics in multiple contexts, highlighting the need for innovative views and investigative practices using Art and Culture. A major objective of this project is to use the Arts for finding the universal sources of culture through exploring diversity, with a particular focus on the role of Africa as the cradle of humanity and dynamic initiatives on the continent. Through collaborative advocacy and the interdisciplinary approach of Leonardo daVinci (1452-1519), relevant generalities for human rights education and humanitarian efforts, this paper contextualizes intercultural dialogue for universal equity in young people's development. The paper also explores how education influences the political development of learners. The paper then shows how humanistic and intercultural approaches to education are fostering creative and critical thinkers worldwide.

Daisaku Ikeda proclaimed that Africa would be the beacon of hope for the world in the twenty-first century. Contemporaneously, Kwame Nkrumah was excited about the potentially galvanizing role a united Africa might play on the world scene. Nkrumah envisioned the reawakening of an African personality, which would provide the foundational essence for the United States of Africa and accelerate African psychological, political, and economic decolonization. Nkrumah's conceptualizations of unity mesh with Ikeda's paradigms of global citizenship. This paper shows how Ikeda's philosophy of value-creating education for global citizenship could amalgamate Africana educational models toward global citizenship as a unifying factor in Africa and the diaspora and as an instrument for making Africana Humanism the spirit of the 21st century.

Soka (value creating) education is a Japanese concept propounded by Tsunesaburo Makiguchi and further developed by Josei Toda and Daisaku Ikeda. This educational philosophy aims to foster individuals who can find meaning in their lives and contribute to the well-being of others to better society. Ubuntu, an African philosophy, espouses togetherness and collectivism. Like value creating education, Ubuntu promotes working for the good of all not solely the individual. Examining these two philosophies, this paper explored their role in promoting humanism. Focusing on the education system in Kenya, this paper investigated how the institutionalization of both philosophies can foster global citizens and realize a more humane Kenya. Furthermore, this paper illustrated the importance of educators as agents of change, aiding students to become global citizens who work towards building a more humanistic society. This paper concluded that integrating both value creating education and Ubuntu in the education system can serve as a tool to nurture individuals who will not only improve their quality of life but also contribute positively to promote a more just and prosperous world.

In this article, the authors focus on ways to structure conversations about racism in world history classrooms through a case study of race and racism in Haiti at the turn of the 19th century. Drawing on the events of the Haitian Revolution, the authors describe how identifying patterns of racial hierarchy can provide a framework for talking about race from a world-scale perspective. While pedagogical strategies for teaching about the Haitian Revolution have been discussed before (Peck-Bartle, 2020; Peguero, 1998), the authors emphasize how world history teachers might present the relevance of Haitian struggles for human dignity and self-determination as a way to further develop students' understandings of race. The objective is to support world history teachers in leading conversations about race as a historical and global construct. [Note: The page range (3-17) shown on the PDF is incorrect. The correct page range for this article is p3-27.]

The old management system crisis and the involvement of new social sectors into participation in management encourage us to study the humanitarian foundations of managing the higher education system. This article discusses the issues of managerial humanitology and the content of special education, and the ratio of civil and professional elements in the formation of a managerial worldview. A feature of contemporary Russian higher education is the highest level of its fundamental natural and humanitarian component. Furthermore, the development of the higher education system in historical retrospective also indicates its humanistic character, which is laid down by Christianity and the Russian Orthodox Church. Naturally, today highly qualified specialists are needed to successfully implement socio-economic reforms in the country, able to understand and implement them properly. In this regard, the higher education system plays a unique role, since higher education, being a social institution, is responsible not only for the inheritance, accumulation, and reproduction of scientific and specialized knowledge but also for the formation and transfer of cultural values and norms of behavior.

The question of how to engage undergraduate students in global learning is even more imperative given recent shifts in the global landscape and in higher education. Utilizing the value rubrics established by the American Association of Colleges and Universities, this analysis considers the importance of the humanities in realizing integrative, global learning in a domestic classroom. Intentionally underscoring global and integrative perspectives on race and ethnicity beyond the domestic sphere produces graduates with proficiencies in intercultural knowledge and competence who are capable of creating and applying solutions to complex global issues. Assessment data reveals growth in student worldviews, perspectives, empathy, and noteworthy internal changes in the learner. The humanistic focus on the human condition results in students meaningfully engaging on individual and community levels, and with heightened insight into the roles they play in the world. As such, they emerge transformed and prepared to thoughtfully engage with the global community.

Fifty years after UNESCO's publication of "Learning to be: The world of education today and tomorrow," the author of this article provides an assessment of this seminal report, commonly known as "the Faure report". He characterises the educational vision of the report as humanistic and democratic and highlights its emphasis on the need for educational provision throughout the life-course. He demonstrates how the right to education has, over time, been transformed into a duty to learn. Moreover, this duty has been strongly tied to economic purposes, particularly the individual's duty to remain employable in a fast-changing labour market. Rather than suggesting that Edgar Faure and his International Commission on the Development of Education set a particular agenda for education that has, over time, been replaced by an altogether different agenda, the author suggests a reading of the report which understands it as making a case for a particular relationship between education and society, namely one in which the integrity of education itself is acknowledged and education is not reduced to a mere instrument for delivering particular agendas. Looking back at the report five decades later, he argues that it provides a strong argument for the emancipation of education itself, and that this argument is still needed in the world of today.

In addition to the longstanding threat posed by narrow economism, faith in the possibility of peace and progress through democratic politics -- central to the humanistic vision of the 1972 Faure report -- today faces additional challenges. These challenges include the ascendancy of neurocentrism in the global policyscape. Whereas the effects of neoliberalism on education have been extensively critiqued, the implications of a newer, related ideological framework known as "neuro"liberalism remain under-theorised. Neuroliberalism combines neoliberal ideas concerning the role of markets in addressing social problems with beliefs about human nature ostensibly grounded in the behavioural, psychological and neurological sciences. This article critically examines a recent initiative of one of UNESCO's Category 1 Institutes -- the Mahatma Gandhi Institute of Education for Peace and Sustainable Development (MGIEP) -- that seeks to mainstream neuroscience and digital technology within global educational policy. Comparing the visions of the 1972 Faure, the 1996 Delors and the 2021 Futures of Education reports with MGIEP's International Science and Evidence Based Education Assessment (ISEEA), the authors analyse continuity and change in UNESCO's attempts to articulate a vision of "scientific humanism" which advocates the use of science for the betterment of humanity. They argue that ISEEA's overall recommendations -- as represented in its Summary for Decision Makers (SDM) -- reinforce a reductive, depoliticised vision of education which threatens to exacerbate educational inequality while enhancing the profits and power of Big Tech. These recommendations exemplify a "neuro"liberal turn in global education policy discourse, marking a stark departure from the central focus on ethics and democratic politics characteristic of UNESCO's landmark education reports. Reanimating, in cruder form, visions of a scientifically-organised utopia of the kind that attracted UNESCO's inaugural Director-General, Julian Huxley, ISEEA's recommendations actually point towards the sort of dystopian "brave new world" of which his brother, Aldous Huxley, warned.

This article looks at the relatively understudied phenomenon of short-term international mobility of faculty from the critical internationalization perspective. It uses data from interviews with academics from Kazakhstan, who participated in short-term professional development trips abroad to understand who benefits and who loses as a result of short-term faculty mobility and how the short-term international mobility may contribute to the process of reproduction of the existing social structures and inequality. Critical internationalization perspective in general, as well as mobility paradigm more specifically, helps to reveal some important insights about short-term international mobility from a non-Western country to predominantly Western institutions. The main conclusion from the study is that host university's engagement in hosting mobile faculty coming on short visits seems to be driven predominantly by the neoliberal profit-seeking motives rather than by a more humanistic desire to serve the larger global society by sharing its expertise or to engage in equal and mutually beneficial partnership relationships.

This essay offers a critique of the culture of specio-vocationalism in American higher education by first drawing on Edmund Husserl's conception of "world" and connecting this notion to education conceived as a "world-disclosing" activity. The essay will then give an account of how the trends of vocationalization and specialization manifest themselves in contemporary university culture, and how they work together to "de-world" the lives of our students and deprive them of possibilities that are part of what it means to be human. After showing how this impoverishment undermines the world-disclosing function of higher education, the essay will then suggest one way to counter this "de-worlding of world": the teaching of the situated finitude of the human condition by reminding our students that our knowledge or sense of the world is always only partial. It is this realization that has the potential of placing our students once again before the vastness of the world in wonder and curiosity. In this realization they will gain a better sense of the world as a distant horizon still to be explored in all of its inexhaustible complexity and meaning. At the same time, coming to grips with their own ignorance will imbue them with an intellectual humility that will shield them not only from their own finitude, but the finitude of others as well. [This paper was presented virtually to the Society for Existential and Phenomenological Theory and Culture on April 30, 2021.]

This paper explores the potential for a mode of postqualitative inquiry as generative knowledge-affect by looking towards the practice-led in-progress intermedial project, "We Found A Body." The project functions as a form of urban play in a way that decentres and reconstructs participants so that their bodies, their technology and the environment they 'play' in become intertwined. I use a posthumanist queer reading of performativity (Barad, 2003, 2011) coupled with an affect-focused study of world-making (Harris & Jones, 2019) alongside a politics of affect to analyse how "We Found a Body," in its potential for intraaction of human, technology, narrative and environment, can reconfigure and intertwine bodies and matter in a dynamic and embodied way. I argue that creative intermedial practice can produce counternarratives where new modes of belonging within space and time exist, and where extended ways of being human are at play (Myers, 2020). This is a space where the artwork acts as a performative call to action where iterative materialisation creates an intrabody of the human and more-than-human and opens up future methods within postqualitative inquiry.

In this essay, we argue that postqualitative inquiry is not a useful descriptor for environmental education research and that it is time to consider what comes after the posts. We argue that thinking with theory as a process methodology in the onto-epistemological framings of our research is more generative and opens up opportunities for this research being interdisciplinary/transdisciplinary/cross-disciplinary, intersectional, ecofeminist/more-than-humanist, indigenous, participatory, experimental and transgressive.

A documented transcript and a series of still images from two spontaneous, incidental and intra-active pedagogical encounters in a preschool are the focus and the source of this article. A turning over of data generated through a piece of doctoral research that explored intra-active learning as a phenomenon makes visible the agency of names and drawings in collaborative and intra-active literacy 'becomings'. These are the workings of a diffractive data analysis. Already strong affective connections between the children give buoyancy to the playful recitation of written names on a pile of pages. Familiar Grade R (reception year) activities take flight and diffract with age, race and gender to produce new knowledge about 'what matters' in early childhood. There are both inward and outward flows between the micro and the macro worlds of 'becoming reader' and 'becoming learner' as names move in between the sounds of belonging and recognition (the children's and their classmates' names), and the pull of identifiable shapes and letters, words and meaning. The importance of drawing as meaning-making is affirmed but exceeded as an experimental performativity spills over into further exploration that was shared and extended with a friend. The analysis moves between and among the conceptual, real and virtual through reflective and diffractive insights. The researcher notices patterns of sameness and difference in the playful literacy and drawing events performed by the children with their lively classroom environment. Reconceptualizing the material products of learning as lively co-producers of knowledge with their authors requires a reconceptualizing of the human and a refiguring of the child as learner. Making the 'child' visible in posthumanist research means recognizing the inseparability of the learner from the learning and the temporal, material and spatial realities that produce it, and noticing the lively entanglements of names and drawings and what they do.

The authors take up the guest editors' invitation to address the difference that posthumanist and feminist 'new' materialist theories make and why this matters politically and ethically. Alongside events from an early childhood (kindergarten) classroom, the authors engage with current conversations which build on and extend Kimberlé Crenshaw's theory of intersectionality with post-philosophies by scholars who identify as Black feminist, Women of Colour feminist, queer theorist, Chicana and/or Indigenous scholars. In an iterative, slow thinking-making-with-reading, this contemplation brings intersectionality and post-philosophies into conversation to explore diffractive-affirmative possibilities for social and curricular (re)shapings. The authors create a philosophical playground to think "identity" and "subjectivity" when engaging with these theories both with/in classroom events and with/in their own co-constituted scholarly and teacherly becomings. The authors set forth several potentially generative frictions in teaching and researching environments.

This article demonstrates how feminist posthumanism can reconfigure conceptualisations of, and practices with, 'child' in Montessori early childhood contexts. It complicates Montessori's contemporary reputation as a 'middle-class phenomenon' by returning to the earliest Montessori schools as a justice-oriented project for working-class children and families. Grappling with the contradictions and inconsistencies of Montessori thought, this article acknowledges the legacy of Montessori's feminism while also situating her project within the wider colonial capitalist context in which it emerged. A critical engagement with Montessori education unsettles modernist conceptualisations of 'child' and its civilising agenda on minds and bodies. Specifically, Montessori child observation (as a civilising mission) is disrupted and reread from a feminist posthumanist orientation to generate more relational, queer and expansive accounts of how 'child' is produced through observation. Working with three 'encounters' from fieldwork at a Montessori nursery, the authors attend to the material-discursive affective manifestation of social class, gender, sexuality and 'race', and what that means for child figurations in Montessori contexts. They conclude by embracing Snaza's 'bewildering education' to reach towards different imaginaries of 'child' that are not reliant on dialectics of 'human' and 'non-human', and that allow 'child' to be taken seriously, without risking erasure of fleshy, leaky, porous, codified bodies in Montessori spaces.

Fast-moving changes to society as part of the digital age are posing new educational challenges that require students to be flexible, adaptive, and growth-oriented. Humanistic knowledge building communities (HKBCs) are a growth promoting pedagogy, suitable to address these challenges. Yet, the way that students' identities as knowledge builders are transformed remains undertheorized. In this study, we rise above existing frameworks of fixedness versus fluidity to elucidate how students develop growth orientations. Using a grounded approach, we examined a graduate course, coding 322 relevant utterances that were expressed by the course participants over the semester. This resulted in a five dimensional framework of fixedness versus growth that was used to describe the personal transformation of students within the HKBC. The changes that students made over time were shown to occur at statistically significant levels. This study suggests that learning communities should focus on the complementary nature of collective idea-advancement and personal growth promotion if they are to address the challenges of preparing students for life in a rapidly changing world.

Posthumanist and antiracist thinkers contend that justice, as articulated by Karen Barad, demands response-ability to ghosts of the past and those yet to come. Normative conceptions of the child do not account for these ghostly engagements. When such normative conceptions direct a teachers' gaze, the child speaking with ghosts may feel they too are not welcome. Without kinship and support grappling with the challenging, even painful, topics that the ghosts raise, they may become discouraged from the larger project of taking response-ability for ghosts in pursuit of justice. In response, the author first repositions the child as rich in potential and a knower who engages with ghosts. Using "travel-hopping" as a methodology, she re-turns to an experience as a teacher who pursued a Master's in Elementary Education as a conversation between her child self, ancestral ghosts, children she worked with, and ghosts those children spoke with. In sharing this experience, the author puts forth travel-hopping through experiences as a valuable method in teacher education. As teachers travel-hop, they can expand their sense of the "child" as capable and powerful in engagements with the more-than-human (broadly defined but focused on ancestral ghosts).

This article concerns itself with the everyday politics of childhood and the ways research might continue to attend to inequities while simultaneously engaging in an ontological flattening of the child subject. To do so, the author employs thinking with theory as an analytic process to make sense of a world where humans and more-than-humans are seen as commodities for economic gain. Focusing on a tweet sent out by a US state-led organization during Pre-K Week, the author uses Barad's concept of the material-discursive apparatus and Bennett's concept of vibrant matter to explore the phenomenon of neoliberal childhoods. Understood as a political event, the author analyzes the tweet as a public phenomenon etched into a digital socio-material archive that tends to have a life of its own. In doing so, she unravels three threads of capaciousness (the capacity to make boundaries and possibilities) in the tweet: visual aesthetics, discursive movements, and virtual reverberations. These threads of capaciousness can be seen as co-constitutive agents, collectively producing the phenomenon of the neoliberal child. In other words, the visual, the discursive, and the virtual work collectively to ravel and unravel material consequences regarding being a child-human living in the USA well beyond the pre-kindergarten years. The article concludes by inviting those concerned with the politics of childhood to consider the ways that posthumanism offers a theoretical and practical conduit for rethinking, reconfiguring, and reimagining child-world relations while continuing to keep childhood studies focused on issues of equity and justice.

New materialism has the potential to deepen critical engagement between vibrant things, everyday places and intra-actions between humans and non-humans in early childhood education. This article explores Australian pre-service teachers' understandings of children and childhood when encountering the vibrant forces of things and places. The authors explore Jane Bennett's 'circuits of sympathy' to analyse the atmospheric forces encountered in pre-service teachers' engagement with new materialism in their final year of study. Their research is guided by the following question: What happens when pre-service teachers conceptualise the posthuman child, things and places as related through circuits of sympathy? The authors suggest that sympathy, considered as a transformative agentic force, can generate connectivity across ideas, matter and practices, and adds depth and new perspectives to understandings of the posthuman child, with the result that new figurations of childhood emerge in this investigation. They conclude by discussing the implications of their study for posthuman research and how circuits of sympathy bring new atmospheric forces to childhood. The posthuman child, embedded in circuits of sympathy, is neither individualised nor collectivised but immersed in, and produced by, the circuit and its flows and disruptions. The modes and qualities of sympathy in the circuit shape what happens next: encounters that are sympathetically charged, are set to create new circuits of sympathy in their next encounters.

In response to the call for papers for this special issue and the questions it poses, the authors show how the ontological posthumanist shift of agential realism does not erase but keeps the child human of colour in play, despite the inclusion of the other-than-(Adult)human in its methodologies. Through a montaging technique, the authors explore the philosophical complexity of 'decentering without erasure' by re-turning to data from a large international research project -- Children, Technology and Play (2019-2020). Through an agential realist reading of interview data 'of' 'seven-year-old' Henry when visiting him at home in an informal settlement in Cape Town, they show "what else is going on," and the politically radical and subtle philosophical difference this makes for reconfiguring child subjectivity. To do more justice to the complexity of reality, the analysis bounces around like Henry's sack ball and zooms in on the role apparatuses such as GoPros play in research. The authors 'follow the child' literally but differently, without excluding or erasing the more-than-(Adult)human. In meeting Henry, they also meet Eshal, who introduces the GoPro(blem). By diffractively reading Karen Barad's scholarship through visual and aural texts, the authors respond to the question of how posthumanist research makes a difference to childhood studies. They show how the agential realist move(ment) from Object and Subject to Phenomenon explodes ageist, ableist, racist, extractive and settler-colonial logics in education research.

With the "Donald Trump Baby Balloon" as a provocation, this work utilizes philosophy as a method and cinema-as/in-philosophy to multi-modally interrogate the particular images of giant babies. Deleuze and Guattari's conceptions of molarity and molecularity and Bakhtin's conception of grotesque bodily images are put to work alongside several cinematic portrayals of giant babies and their social material contexts, including the animated fantasy "Spirited Away," the family comedy "Honey, I Blew Up the Kid," the independent short "Las Palmas," and the Disney-Pixar superhero franchise "Incredibles." Within this constellation of images and texts, the giant baby emerges as a specific entanglement of developmentalism, humanism, and neoliberalism. Furthermore, the ways in which images of giant babies materialize particular notions of monstrosity, consumption, and destruction might disrupt some commonsense notions of time and bodies. This kind of destabilization of concepts furthers the argument for employing a philosophical, cinematic axiology within the realm of childhood studies.

By troubling notions of time-as-progress and human exceptionality, this paper considers what shifts in conceptualisations of children's literacies and futures might be possible in the context of faltering of capitalist logics of progress. The paper draws on a 3 year ethnographic study with families and young children in northern England, which asked what might be learnt about young children's literacies by starting with the everyday in communities. Arguing for the interconnection between notions of human exceptionalism, human/planetary relations and literacies and language, the paper offers some alternative directions for sorely needed imaginaries about the role of literacies in how young children relate to their worlds.

School-based counseling policy researchers often address their epistemological orientation (e.g., empiricism, scientific method, phenomenology) supporting their investigations. Curiously, however, the literature rarely speaks to the metaphysical issues grounding this research. In the authors view, advocating for and conducting rigorous policy research and evaluation without taking time a priori to reflect on the "deeper" issues involved indicates a shallow approach to this endeavor. More plainly, how often do scholars intentionally deliberate individually and collaboratively on their philosophical orientation guiding their work? In this editorial, the authors demonstrate that personalism is a viable alternative to establish student counseling services and concomitant policy and evaluation research. This approach undergirds in many respects various strengths-based perspectives of human functioning (e.g., person-centered humanistic and positive psychology; see, e.g., Lopez, Pedrotti, & Snyder, 2019). It is their hope that future school-based policy and evaluation research will be guided by the tenets of personalism and its correlates.

In this study, a modified version of the Curriculum Orientation Inventory for Early Childhood Education (COI-ECE) is developed and validated with a sample of 717 in-service teachers from fifty Hong Kong pre-primary schools. Results of confirmatory factor analysis show that the curriculum beliefs of pre-primary school teachers can be conceptualised into four dimensions: humanistic, cognitive process/academic, technological, and social reconstruction orientations. Results also reveal that pre-primary school teachers hold strong humanistic orientation beliefs while cognitive process/academic orientation beliefs are held less strongly. Further analyses by one-way ANOVA tests find that differences in curricular orientation beliefs are related to teachers' educational level and teaching position. This study reaffirms the importance of implementing an integrated developmentally appropriate curriculum in promoting whole-child development in children's early years. The implications for supporting and sustaining teachers' curriculum-based planning and subsequent teaching practices will be discussed.

One of the main conditions for quality assurance in education is the recognition and internalisation of shared values. Education based on shared values creates the preconditions for achieving educational goals and contributing to the creation of social and economic well-being of society. Lithuanian education documents establish important values on which the education process should be based. However, in practice, general education schools in Lithuania face difficulties in implementing the provisions. To promote continuous quality management in general education schools in Lithuania, since 2007, the processes for evaluating the performance quality have been introduced: self-evaluation and external evaluation. These processes are based on collegial interaction and should contribute to positive, value-based changes in the quality of education. The study's purpose was to reveal the attitude of educators to the influence of evaluation processes on the recognition of educational values in practice. The system of educational values and their evaluation were analysed based on the normative documents content analysis and the attitude of educators to educational values and their practical implementation, analysed by the questionnaire method. Studies showed that evaluation contributes to the recognition of educational values in practice, but the reliability factors of evaluation have little influence on this.

This study is about the curriculum theorizing of self-other and transformation. The two authors, both of Asian heritage, share their lived experience and interpretations of Chapter 20 of "I-Ching." This paper revisits a conventional, humanistic division of self-other as a launching pad to challenge the current discourse on cultural diversity and curriculum change. Mainly, the authors revisit the dichotomous understanding of self-other and challenge modes of curriculum change that are operated by the logic of meritocracy and individual effort. This investigation of "I-Ching" opens up its landscape through a conversation about personal and social change, with an epistemological shift from the self-other binary, thus imagining curriculum implications for a different society. The process of writing narratives is an epistemological healing process in that writing as inquiry helps revalue indigenous intellectual treasures that have been denigrated by Eurocentric ideologies both historically and politically. This examination of "I-Ching," specifically hexagram 20, will provide educators with an innovative epistemological frame that will allow them to review, rethink, challenge, and possibly advance discourses on seeing, change, and self-other in curriculum and cultural studies.

Oscar Wilde was described by W. B. Yeats as "a man of action, a born dramatist." Although people did not recognize him as a serious playwright until the 1890s, Wilde had managed to find other outlets for his theatrical passion, for example in writing fiction. In this paper, it is argued that Wilde incorporates metadrama into his 1888 fairy tale collection, "The Happy Prince and Other Tales." The discussion focuses on how Wilde employs the metatheatrical devices of the-play-within-the-play and role-playing to treat the social problems of self-immolating altruism and identity crisis respectively. In representing the social malady of exaggerated self-sacrifice, Wilde adopts the satirizing strategy which maintains the sense of the illusion evoked by the inset tale while simultaneously estranging the outer/inner story connection by dint of nonrecognition. Similarly, identity crisis is reflected through an estranged mode of role-playing: Wilde's characters impress the reader as performing too much to have a real-life identity. The ironic detachment enabled by the two metadramatic tactics in question constructs a mask, which allows Wilde to criticize social problems in a non-imitative manner, the central aim of the 1888 volume. In Wilde's fairy tales, the use of metadrama, in facilitating representations from a critical distance, can be seen as an example of what is labelled as "sincere mannerisms." Beneath the mask of his insincerity, Wilde is truly a serious humanist, assiduous in imparting to us the knowledge of ourselves and our existential condition.

This special issue contributes to the vibrant debates concerning the 'responses and intensifying inequalities in the Global South' underway with regard to COVID-19 and the subsequent crises of higher education. With neoliberal globalization in a deeper crisis by the pandemic, transforming higher education and teaching configurations in ways that appease the rich and powerful players, while simultaneously seeking to neutralize forms of equity in education. Rather than pointing fingers at the broken structures and wider external economic framework, we argue that re-centring the humanistic, holistic and bottom-up approach that frames the post-pandemic higher education offers a more useful framework for understanding educational transformation in the contemporary period.

Innovations in genetics, nanotechnology and artificial intelligence involve the possibility of enhancement of human attributes and capacities--offering humans innumerable opportunities for diverse, unprecedented experiences and developments both physically and cognitively. These new innovations, frequently associated with theoretical frameworks such as transhumanism, not only raise new ethical-pedagogical questions but also challenge the very meaning of education. Core educational concepts pertaining to the human being, personhood, and the educational self now need to be re-examined or rediscovered in confrontation with transhumanist values. In regard to this task, we investigate Bostrom's teleological approach towards transhumanist values, questioning his understanding of the human person and the inherent implications of a sensible agenda for education, situated within the broad humanist tradition. As an alternative to an educational prospect based on, or endorsing, transhumanist values, we adopt Spaemann's personalist program, implementing his distinction between 'being someone' versus 'being something'. Defending an understanding of the person as someone, and not as a thing that shall be cultivated, we employ Spaemann's distinction between anthropocentrism versus anthropomorphism, recognising the importance of contextualising the human being in a broader existential, embodied framework, while acknowledging the critique of the anthropocene. Along these lines, we elaborate on an understanding of education and the educated person that, in our view, safeguards core human values. In the discussion, we draw on insights from Spaemann, Arendt, Kierkegaard and Gadamer.

The aim of the study is to develop an analytical framework to study the effect of Information and Communication Technology (ICT) education on humanistic innovative potential. The study recruited 150 school age children from three secondary schools and 100 university students from two universities in Russia. Each respondent's humanistic potential was measured using the Pomitkin's Spiritual Potential of a Personality Inventory. The proposed framework consists of several components: a motivational component, a content component, an activity component, a value component, and an imitational component. The results of the study show that the proposed framework allows improving the spiritual potential of learners. The percentage of learners with low spiritual potential dropped 24% (among school students) and 12% (among university students). The proposed framework is expected to optimize the teaching/learning process with ICTs and direct the student's learning toward enhancing the humanistic innovative potential.

This chapter explores the urgent relevance of posthumanist theory and practice for democratizing creative educational experiences in 21st-century schools, universities, and informal learning environments. Posthumanism challenges the myopic centering of the human in creative education in an age of climate change, artificial intelligence, and zoonotic disease, where nonhuman agencies are intricately imbricated in human cultures and lives. Using a cartographic methodology, the chapter critically maps key theories and debates in posthumanist creativity studies across four substantive fields of inquiry: (a) process philosophy; (b) affect studies; (c) place-based education; and (d) creative ecology. Drawing links between theoretical concepts and practical examples of creative experience across formal and informal education contexts, the chapter scopes an alternative agenda for critical studies of creativity in light of the posthuman turn.

The movement from STEM to STEAM, with its emphasis on real-world applications, promises to meet the changing needs of a globally connected world. However, the potential of transdisciplinarity to inspire and deepen our understanding of who we are and how we make sense of a world in turmoil remains undertheorized. This article makes a case for repositioning STEAM education as democratized enactments of transdisciplinary education, where arts and sciences are not separate or even separable endeavors. Drawing upon posthumanist theorizing, three projects will exemplify transdisciplinarity across music, mathematics, and science education. Transgressing and transcending disciplinary boundaries, and attending to both human and nonhuman perspectives, we invite a rethink of the work of schools, going beyond democratizing creativity to fully enact posthumanist transdisciplinarity.