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This article shares reflections from members of the community of philosophers of education in the United States and Canada who were invited to express their insights in response to the theme ‘Snaps...

In this paper I draw on the concept of Confucian self -cultivation to strengthen John Dewey’s democratic education project. For Dewey, democracy is primarily a form of associated living, marked by the broad sharing of interests and rich communication among social groups. In appealing to Confucian philosophy to bolster Dewey’s educational project I adopt the framework of global Intercultural philosophy, placing philosophical approaches from different cultural traditions together to augment intellectual resources and advance philosophical understanding. This approach initially dictates a comparative method: “setting into dialogue sources from across cultural, linguistic, and philosophical streams” (Littlejohn, n.d.). I draw particularly upon the Analects of Confucius, the collected works of John Dewey, and standard interpretive works. But I go beyond mere comparison, to argue for an enriched form of democratic education, bolstered by Confucian insights, and suitable for contemporary Western democracies.

In this paper I account for the role of guiding intuitions in teaching, focusing on the intuitions formed in the process of lesson planning. I start (in section one) by reviewing some research on lesson planning to locate the role of intuition in the process. I then turn to Wertheimer’s and Kohler’s gestalt psychology (section two) and Dewey’s theory of consummatory experience (section three) further to clarify and explain the process of lesson planning as the formation of guiding intuitions. I conclude that gestalt psychology is a less promising framework for explaining guiding intuitions than Dewey’s theory of experience.

In this chapter, I examine potential contribution of massive open online courses (MOOCs) to universities and their students. Rather than speaking about MOOCs in the abstract, I examine actual MOOCs that point to future developments. I locate three areas where MOOCs can make positive contributions: return on investment, new revenue streams, and revolutionary new course and credential formats. The first two contribute to university students, faculty, and administrative leaders within the entrenched university. The new formats indicate a shift from that paradigm to a “Higher Education 2.0” paradigm—the revolution of access to online learning where outcomes can be documented through badges, certificates, and nanodiplomas. Higher Education 2.0 offers a pathway to employment that by-passes conventional universities and their degree programs.

While John Dewey wrote relatively little about higher education, he had a well-developed and largely unexplored conception of the university, grounded in his three- stage account of thought or inquiry as developed in Studies in Logical Theory and further developed in Logic: Theory of Inquiry. The first stage is antecedent to inquiry proper, residing in the situations of living that evoke thought. The second is inquiry proper, where data or immediate materials are subjected to systematic thought to yield judgment. The third is the moment after thought has considered its data and reached its result and brought it forth in situations of living as transformed by this new element. This final stage, is the “objective of thought” but lies outside of the context of inquiry proper. This chapter, building on the Dewey corpus, explains that conception, with close attention to university-based research, teaching, and service.

John Dewey's Democracy and Education is the touchstone for a great deal of modern educational theory. It covers a wide range of themes and issues relating to education, including teaching, learning, educational environments, subject matter, values, and the nature of work and play. This Handbook is designed to help experts and non-experts to navigate Dewey's text. The authors are specialists in the fields of philosophy and education; their chapters offer readers expert insight into areas of Dewey work that they know well and have returned to time and time again throughout their careers. The Handbook is divided into two parts. Part I features short companion chapters corresponding to each of Dewey's chapters in Democracy and Education. These serve to guide readers through the complex arguments developed in the book. Part II features general articles placing the book into historical, philosophical and practical contexts and highlighting its relevance today.

The members of the working group on National Educational Technology Policy continue to base their formulations around entrenched conceptions of education, retaining the language of teachers, students, curriculum standards, specified objectives and the like. Several of those participating in the panel examining the policy report in an earlier issue (Volume 8 Number 2 2011) of E-Learning and Digital Media worried that these conceptions hamper imagination about new educational possibilities already bubbling up around the edges of conventional educational practice. The working group authors, in their rejoinder, have defended choosing and building on the older framework as a more practicable avenue for rapid change. Here Raymond Rose and Leonard Waks respond by (a) teasing out deep conflicts about this choice within the working group report, and (b) demonstrating the heavy costs of sticking with what Rose and Waks see as an outmoded approach to learning and education in the age of the Internet.

This article critiques the report of President Obama's taskforce on educational technology, ‘Transforming American Education’. It calls into question the claims of the authors that the proposed policy is ‘revolutionary’, and then offers a point-by-point comparison between the report's recommendations and those derived from a perspective taking full account of the genuinely revolutionary implications for learning of the new web 2.0 technologies. It concludes that the taskforce proposals constrain rather than facilitate the digital revolution in education.

In this essay, Leonard Waks reconsiders the issue of the public character of charter schools, that is, schools funded through public taxation but operated by non-state organizations such as nonprofit and for-profit educational corporations and nongovernmental public interest organizations. Using John Dewey's conception of a democratic public as a framework, Waks examines the following questions: (1) Are schools chartered and funded by government, but operated by nonprofit nongovernmental organizations, ever appropriate instruments of a democratic public? (2) If so, what criteria might distinguish those that are appropriate from those that are not? (3) How might public education be re-institutionalized so as to include the charter schools that are appropriate? Waks concludes that Dewey's theory of democratic publics can play a useful role in thinking about how to balance the democratic benefits of charter schools for the various subcommunities of our society with the democratic requirement of broad public discourse and intergroup education.