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This article studies topological reflexivity in educational policy discourse, when policy is considered in terms of eradicating the distances involved and increasing mobility and commensurability. Topological reflexivity is critically evaluated from a Lacanian point of view as a form of political fantasy which structures reality within the coordinates of desire. The article also unpacks two prominent symptoms of fantasy -- dislocation and paradoxical elements -- that subvert the functioning of these very same fantasies. First, while heralding imminent fulfilment and the promise of pleasure in new learning environments, these discourses are also obliged to keep the object of desire at a certain distance. Second, while educational policy discourse is founded on subjective autonomy and a freedom to develop learning environments, it implicitly requires teachers and schools to implement new learning environments and to take pleasure in doing so. Attempts to grapple with these symptoms of fantasy take the form of denying not only the repetition inherent in such discourses, but also the othering of teachers who express resistance to such changes.

Self-cultivation--taking pedagogical action to educate oneself--is an integral part of non-formal adult education. Ever since Greek antiquity, it has been a central ingredient in the western philosophical and educational tradition. However, we argue that the global challenges that have emerged in the present era of the ecological crisis call for a new kind of understanding of this basic educational phenomenon. Based in particular on recent work in dark ecology and its central concept of the 'uncanny', we outline a few key features of our time in relation to the contemporary challenge of self-cultivation. We then review extant literature on self-cultivation to ascertain whether the theoretical resources that have been used to conceptualise it in the past are capable of addressing these new aspects of self-cultivation. We conclude that each of the theoretical resources analysed here offer valuable insights into the novel challenges facing self-cultivation, though not all important questions can be answered. By specifying the contributions and limitations of these theoretical resources, we pave the way for future work on conceptualising self-cultivation for our times.

There are currently two broad forms of critique undergirding environmental education theories: the first is one of subtraction from perceived reality as it seeks to reveal and remove illusions and ideologies, while the other takes the inverse form of adding to reality in the form of investigating how matter comes to matter. We suggest a third form that explores the paradoxical and uncanny aspects of ecological awareness and assumes an apophatic, self-negating form, which short-circuits and relinquishes all attempts at epistemological closure. In this third form, we are drawing on themes from dark ecology, which maintains that ecological awareness is decidedly 'weird' as it assumes the guise of an 'Oedipal' logic, a narrative trope in which the protagonist seeking to avoid a tragic fate finds out that avoidance itself is the realization of the tragedy. Using Timothy Morton's work as a springboard, we unpack the import of such looping temporality onto the onto-epistemological frameworks of environmental education.

The article focuses on infrastructures as heterogeneous assemblages. Our claim is that to examine something as elusive as data infrastructure calls for an epistemological and methodological approach consistent with the fluid ontology of the object of study. Moreover, we assert that there is no position of exteriority from which to critique data infrastructures. Our question is thus primarily methodological: How might we analyse the relational and heterogeneous nature of data infrastructures in a way that both problematizes and builds on the impossibility of exteriority? We examine two dispositions of data infrastructures: first comes their provisional, dispersed and entangled character, and second, the affective attachments imbued therein. Overall, this paper, first, returns to the ontological and theoretical perspectives on what data infrastructures are; second, makes a contribution to the methodological question of how to study them; and, third, develops a means of critique that do not locate the analyst outside the object of the critique, reminding us of the immanent relationality of data infrastructures and of the necessity to take these seriously in the methodological approach. The paper works with the existing literature on data infrastructures and research methods in education policy analysis, and with our own research data and first-hand experiences.

The future is rarely problematised in education even though it is self-evident in everyday schoolwork and present also in the management of education. However, we should understand how different future visions influence our understanding of education. In this paper, we apply rhetorical analysis and study how the future of education is rhetorically constructed in Finnish policy texts. Also, we analyze the special characteristic of Finnish future visions, which are based on the idea of Finnish education being top-notch. We focus explicitly on the idea of knowledge and its future relations in school education. In our data, the current school is rhetorically contrasted with the future one. This hastens the need to modernize Finnish school system. This view is reinforced by the needs of the economy and working life. Pathos is frequently used as a rhetorical strategy. Finns are warned about remaining in the past and obliged to change their education immediately. Future visions of Finnish education seem to be limited only to positive aspects.

The study of topological policy cultures highlights a tendency in policy spaces to undo the effects of topographical and cultural distances and differences. In contemporary education policy trends, such traits are present in the attempts to reimagine classroom spaces. A case in point is Future Classroom Lab (FCL), a physical classroom concept developed and spread across Europe, which promotes the use of digital technologies and divides the classroom into different functional 'zones'. We analyse FCL as a prototype that incites open exploration in the use and design of classrooms. We argue that prototypes are sometimes equally morphing into proto-practices, which are practised forms of prototypes that are in constant flux, enabling new and different functions, meanings and emotions to emerge. Prototypes and proto-practices secure the continuous transformation of policy spaces through relatively open variation, differentiation and exploration. As such, they are emblematic of contemporary topological policy cultures. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While contemplative approaches have recently garnered much attention in different areas of transformative education, the interpersonal and relational aspects of contemplative training have received less scrutiny. This article examines the relational dynamics involved in contemplative education from a Lacanian viewpoint. The concept of transference is used to unpack the fantasies, desires, and errors involved in contemplation, a process aimed at deep existential realization. Transcripts of Zen Buddhist koan training from Philip Kapleau's classic book "The Three Pillars of Zen" are used as a case in point.

Images of brains circulate today as rationales for decision-making and selectivity in policies, curriculum, preservice teacher education and inservice professional development. The excitement over brain-based research, its visual reach and authorizing role accompanies longstanding debates in which the status attributed to biology, physiology and allied psychological approaches has been considered prejudicial. This article traces a series of dislocations in the linkages forged between discourses of vision and epistemic authorization, and how they still inhere in contemporary debates over brain imaging. The critical history that the article offers within the general framework of Visual science and technology studies requires questioning some of the core tenets of visual culture, including what gets to count as the visual, 'its' role in legitimation, and the primacy assigned to looking and observation as strategies of truth-production.

Escalating ecological events like global warming haunt our lived experience of place and demand thinking the concept anew in environmental education research. Using Timothy Morton's notions of hyperobjects and dark ecology as a springboard, we articulate the uncanny--the withdrawn, unknowable, excessive and anxiety-provoking--aspects of place that events like global warming disclose for place-based pedagogies. Given the advent of hyperobjects as a theoretical model coupled with the ontological and ethical attunement of dark ecology, we suggest conceptualizing place through the strategies of juxtaposition and working-through in order to begin thinking through the implications of how to live in dark places that are haunted by the reality of hyperobjects.

Although often labelled obsolete and ethically dubious, twentieth-century behaviourist principles of learning have been central to the development of instructional technology and the design of modern learning environments. Using Andrew Pickering's philosophy, this article addresses behaviourism as a mangle of practice to highlight the conceptual and non-human agency involved in research on learning, and to analyse how these forms of agency allow scientific knowledge to travel from experimental research settings to teaching.

Background/Objectives Obesity in early childhood is associated with increased risk of chronic diseases, but studies of body composition at preschool ages are sparse. Therefore, we examined differences in body composition by sex and obesity status in Finnish preschool-aged children and within-individual changes in body composition in normal and overweight children. Subject/Methods Body composition was measured using segmental multifrequency bioimpedance analysis (BIA) in 476 children and in 781 children at age 3 and 5 years, respectively. Of those, 308 had repeated BIA measurements at both ages. BMI-SDS was used for classification of normal weight and overweight children. Results Sex difference in the amount of lean mass (LM) was already seen at 3 years of age (boys 11.7 kg, girls 11.3 kg; p < 0.001). At 5 years of age, boys had lower fat mass (FM; 3.6 kg vs. 3.9 kg, p < 0.001), lower percent fat mass (%FM; 17.2% vs. 19.1%; p < 0.001), and higher LM (16.0 kg vs. 15.2 kg; p < 0.001) than girls. Overweight children had higher values in FM, %FM, and LM compared with normal weight peers at both ages. Among normal weight children, the increase of LM by age was associated with only minor changes in FM, whereas children who were or became overweight both LM and FM was substantially increased between 3 and 5 years of age. Conclusions BIA-assessed body composition differs by sex and obesity status already at age of 3 years. For children who are or become overweight at very young age, the patterns for the changes in LM and FM by age are different than for normal weight children., Author(s): Tuija Leskinen [sup.1] [sup.2] , Aino-Maija Eloranta [sup.3] [sup.4] , Tuomo Tompuri [sup.3] , Antti Saari [sup.5] , Helena Ollila [sup.6] , Johanna Mäkelä [sup.7] , Harri Niinikoski [sup.8] [...]

This article discusses the rhetorical strategies in Finnish educational policy documents dealing with digitalization. The documents argue that the national education system is in dire need of digital technologies in order to modernize its pedagogy and secure national economic competitiveness. Finnish municipalities, schools and teachers have high levels of autonomy in implementing curricula, so there is a challenge to them to adopt digitalization at all levels of education.

This paper offers an overview of contemporary inscriptions of mindfulness, their conditions of possibility, and examples of the braining of mind on which contemporary neuro-meets-contemplative turns are dependent. We examine key nineteenth-century events integral to the formation of Biologies Old, in which historic debates over "the death of God" in Western worldviews forge a space of finitude dedicated to fleshy materiality and the relocation of "bios." We also examine what emerges in the wake of such debates, including how Biologies New and a transcendence/immanence horizon continues to reverberate through popular, contemporary recommendations for mindfulness in teaching.

The article discusses the allegedly decontextualized and ahistorical traits in positivist educational research and curriculum by examining its emergence in early twentieth-century empirical education. Edward Lee Thorndike's educational psychology is analyzed as a case in point. It will be shown that Thorndike's positivist educational psychology stressed the need to account for the reality of schooling and to produce knowledge of the actual contexts of education. Furthermore, a historical analysis informed by Michel Foucault's history of the human sciences reveals that there are multiple historical temporalities involved in Thorndike's educational psychology. This allows a new critical angle to be taken on positivist educational research. The question concerning the contexts of empirical education turns to examining the way the conditions of possibility for scientific knowledge in education involve practices of contextualization as well as paradoxical and self-defeating elements.

In recent years there has been a global call for more scientific knowledge about education as a basis of governance. This means that exact descriptions of the reality of schooling should inform decisions about what works in education. In this article, evaluation and testing are analysed as cartography, the art of mapping educational spaces, which both creates and confuses our sense of educational reality. By using elements from cultural studies of cartography as well as sociology and the philosophy of science, this article claims that the analogy of cartography and evaluation can open novel vistas for contemplating the relationship between the world of education and its scientific representation. As a case in point, the article uses the construction of Finnish comprehensive basic school reform and the evaluation system pertaining to it. The analysis shows how evaluation as the mapping of the reality of education brings distant objects near, onto a homogeneous, stable plane. It also makes certain things visible while leaving others out of sight. Furthermore, evaluation as cartography is not only passive representation; it actually creates new spaces. In this way, evaluation practices can profoundly affect how we think and act upon schooling. (Contains 2 notes and 1 figure.)