Research in Education

This paper reckons with the educator’s role in modern education systems by using the ideas of complicity and resistance to explore the challenge of working equitably within inequitable systems. I argue that viewing complicity and resistance on a spectrum and actions in their wider social and political context helps us to understand, as educators, not only our own complicity with the oppression that modern educational systems generate but also the degree to which we are constrained in our own actions. Further, I suggest that educators work within constraints that make an individualistic view of subjectification as an educational purpose impossible and that pursuit of this may not, in turn, serve students well when they encounter constraints to freedom outside the classroom. Given this, I suggest that it is still possible to practice a form of pastoral pedagogy that prioritises engagement with the individual and uses a non-coercive approach to support autonomy for students but that this form of pedagogy additionally allows for consideration of the constraints the teacher and the student may be subject to. I use the film Woman in the Dunes (Suna No Onna, 1964) as a thinking tool for this discussion and suggest that engaging with the film allows for a form of thinking aloud on the topic of complicity, resistance and pastoral pedagogy by presenting a ‘meaningful world’ that is not reducible to simple classification nor is purely illustrative (Gibbs, 2017a; Gibbs, 2017b, p278). Encountering, via film, a completely new world and considering the parallels with more familiar educational contexts, allows for a consideration of wider ethical questions about education and the role of educators (Laugier, 2021).

In this introduction to the special issue on “Utopias and Science Fictions in Education Theory and Philosophy”, we explore the points of departure that brought these contributions together, including our Summer School in the coastal town of Gdynia (generously supported by PESGB and the European Solidarity Centre in Gdansk) where participants were given the opportunity to enact in real time utopian and speculative modes of thinking and writing on the present state of education. The Summer School was a culmination of several years of thinking together about the role, the actuality, or indeed the (im)possibility of utopias and science fictions in theorising about education, which we briefly summarise in the text. This special issue showcases how science fiction and educational theory, when placed in dialogue, can reanimate the utopian dimension of education. By experimenting with axioms, reassembling everyday utopias, and engaging in speculative fabulation, the essays collected here suggest that utopia remains vital for charting the horizons of educational thought. Within these horizons, utopian thought may no longer appear as the grand projection of modernity but persist as practices and forms of thinking and theory production, offering, just like science fiction, a mode of imagination and a way of inhabiting the present otherwise. To affirm this is not to indulge in mere fantasy, but to recognize that education itself consists in and educational theory could become an invitation to think beyond what is.

The increased use of student experience survey questionnaires in higher education such as NSSE (USA), AUSSE (AU), ETLQ (UK), and NSS (UK), can be seen as vital parts of an ongoing transition towards a subtle neoliberal governance that works through institutions’ self-correction in relation to politically defined indicators. Recently new automated feedback functions that invite students to compare their responses to a numerical average have been added to some of these survey questionnaires, which indicates that the survey questionnaires are also aiming at cognitive or behavioral change among students. However, the question of whether the survey questionnaires also have performative effects on the students has gained only little attention in research. Addressing this gap, the article presents a small qualitative interview study focusing on students in Finland and Denmark and their encounter with the student survey questionnaires of their country: HowULearn (FI) and the Learning Barometer (DK). The study unfolds within an actor-network-theoretic framework in which survey questionnaire technologies are conceptualised as actors that carry particular normativities with them, yet open to interpretation and mediation by students and others. While previous research suggests that the student survey questionnaires represent a political appropriation of students’ voices, the study shows that complex distributed negotiations play out in students’ encounters with the survey questionnaires. The findings have implications for how we understand the performative effects of student experience survey questionnaires in terms of student conduct.

This article outlines, by means of a critique of film criticism, the processes of self-formation and subject-formation as affected by unconscious education. The basic definition of the unconscious used is: something that happens to someone without them being consciously aware of it happening, unless their attention to it is actively drawn. This is a functional definition used to develop a critical argument specific to the filmic and theoretical texts used in the article and is not an attempt to capture other definitions of the unconscious within its scope except where explicitly mentioned. While Freud is engaged indirectly through more recently theoretical work, including my own, the deep relationship to Freud’s thought is beyond the scope of this article and is therefore – consciously – only gestured towards. Unconscious education, as defined in the context of this article, is as much about what in our experience might be out of focus, which, in aural terms might be heard without listening. As such, this article charts a theoretical and practical movement from hearing to listening and passive inattention to active attention in the context of film and film criticism, with a specific focus on film music. This specific focus, though, is principally a means of illustrating (note the visual metaphors) a theoretical position that can be considered across the full range of educational experiences and practices, including research and criticism.

Bella, in Gray’s 1992 novel Poor Things, fell into the Clyde attempting to end her life. She was pulled up from the Thames in Lanthimos’ 2023 film adaptation. Bella can be argued to represent Scottish Nationalism, but resetting the film omits this, recasting the source to be more palatable to a global audience. Similarly, Scottish education has been recast over centuries. This paper will problematise the drive to distinguish Scottish education from English, and the conflict between policy designed to play well on the local and international stages in the “global education race” (Sellar et al., 2017). Using a body schema, the paper is introduced via the Extremities: necessary information about the texts, Derrida’s hauntology (Derrida, 1994) and Lacan’s signifiers (Jacques Lacan, 2007), and how these are used to grasp at the argument being presented. The Limbs looks at Scotland’s first steps towards maturation through exploring the power dynamics of key education acts and the location of the Scotch Education Department. The Throat explores language’s importance and the impact of Scotland’s assimilation of English on its indigenous languages and their connections to Education. The Mind looks at Scottish education in present day in which, after successfully fighting for their own parliament, education has become a top priority, aiming to recreate a cherished (and mythologised) system, although it would appear that it finds itself dredging many of its foundational ideas from the Thames, or perhaps the Atlantic Ocean. Finally, the Whole concludes the piece. As Poor Things is a rewriting of Frankenstein, Scotland’s current education system is equally too a mishmash of recast myths, attempted fixes for past hauntings, and attempts to step into modernity. This work uses the comparison of the film and novel to generate fresh insights into Scottish Educational policy.

In this paper, we will take our cue from the metatheoretical question about the role of utopia within educational theory. In this endeavour, we will build upon some debates in the German and Italian contexts which have insisted that a “utopian vector” is a constitutive dimension of the modern discourse in educational theory and philosophy, to the extent that reflection on education is “autonomous” (but not independent) from other sources (such as the sciences of education). In this wake, by valorizing the idea of utopia as a thought experiment, we will explore in what sense science fiction, understood as speculative fiction, may represent a vehicle for educational theorising, and we will show how it operates both within the 'technical' and in the critical understanding of educational theory, Against this backdrop, we will zoom in on the postcritical understanding and investigate the differences in its take on utopia in comparison with both the scientific-technological views (such as Skinner’s) and the critical outlooks.

This article explores the metaphor of punk as qualitative inquiry, which, according to the authors, expands research possibilities by opening the researcher to what is instinctive, emotional, angry, dirty and noisy – those dimensions of human existence that in traditional methodological reflection are omitted or treated as waste, data to be cleared. We propose the figure of the pogo-bricoleur to introduce a different variety of engaged, critical qualitative inquiry. By analyzing pogo dancing and noise associated with punk rock, we investigate the critical dimension of such research in the spirit of critical qualitative inquiry and their relationship to theory.

This study explored the contextual conditions that inform the pedagogical reasoning of EFL Arab expert teachers in the Northern Triangle area in Israel. While studies conducted on teachers’ pedagogical reasoning are myriad, many of these studies deal with pedagogical reasoning in a decontextualized manner. Teachers in politically and socially complex circumstances, however, have to deal with other elements including security issues, sociopolitical tensions, and societal instability. Because context is believed to be a key player that shapes many aspects of the educational process, this study explores teachers’ pedagogical reasoning as informed by the features of a particular security-sensitive, sociocultural-educational context, in our case, the Arab Israeli context in the Northern Triangle Area in Haifa District. Twelve well-reputed Arab expert teachers of English with a teaching seniority of more than 5 years of work in Arab junior and high schools were interviewed in the ‘for’ (before class) and ‘on’ (after class) action phases of their teaching. Analysis drew on Shulman’s (1987) and Pang’s (2016) conceptualizations of pedagogical reasoning as initial interpretative lenses. Findings indicate that teachers’ pedagogical reasoning is informed by contextual factors related to their society, to teachers themselves, and to learners. The local findings of the study provide insights into how teachers adapt instructional strategies not only to pedagogical goals but also to external realities, including safety and sociopolitical considerations. These findings highlight the key role of context in expert teachers’ pedagogical reasoning, particularly in politically complicated and conflict-sensitive environments.

How and where can one find hope amid the blasted landscape of higher education? It has been 30 years since Bill Readings declared the university “in ruins” and things can scarcely be said to have improved since then. Some place their hope in trying to recover and rebuild “the public university”. This paper takes a different tack. Rather than considering higher education “in crisis” (from which recovery might be possible), the paper invites us to consider the post-apocalyptic academy (the end of a world). A post-apocalyptic lens has heuristic value because it frees the imagination from the constraints imposed by a romantic attachment to the past and provides a position from which to look at ourselves anew. Taking inspiration from Jonathan Lear’s study of Plenty Coups, the last great Chief of the Crow Nation, and the “radical hope” that enabled Coups to lead his people through a process of cultural collapse, the paper explores what it might mean to adopt a stance of radical hope in the face of the collapse of purpose and meaning within the contemporary academy. Arguing for the importance of reading radical hope in conjunction with Fredric Jameson’s “anti-anti-utopianism”, the paper offers some thoughts on what an anti-anti-utopian radical hope might look like and call on us to do. These are illustrated through vignettes reflecting on articulations of hope to be found within a number of post-apocalyptic science fiction novels. Some may regard the hope emerging from this discussion a little “thin”. It may also, however, be the best hope we have.

In this paper, I discuss debates related to the nature of scholarly practices such as reading in the digital age, and how these are underpinned by a range of utopian and dystopian visions of the future of the university. Rather than summarily dismissing these visions as positing ‘unattainable elsewheres’ or as paradoxical forms of nostalgic alarmism that deny the reality of the present, I instead take seriously some of the values that both sides of the debate seek to preserve. In line with certain strands of contemporary utopian scholarship, utopianism here does not relate to a static future state, but rather a form of thinking that is fruitful in helping us make sense of what we value as scholarly practices in the university. Here, however, I focus on the idea of dystopianism as a mode of thought which performs a similar affirmative function. In the case of digital dystopianism in particular, I argue that what is affirmed is a sense of scholarly reading as positing perpetual loose ends, something that is nevertheless still possible in the digital age provided we subscribe to a more pluralistic understanding of what it means to read.

While school is oftentimes described in dystopic terms, it can also be envisioned as a utopia – a place of freedom and equality where social hierarchies are irrelevant and time is dedicated to studying the world rather than serving profit and utility. Even if most contemporary schools tend much more towards the dystopian, the utopian dimension persists as an ever-present irreducible aspect of the school. Understanding what is at stake in school education requires an examination of the meaning and implications of this duality. To do that, I draw on two political thinkers: Herbert Marcuse and Jacques Rancière. By highlighting the aesthetic dimensions of their views, I demonstrate how, for both, utopia and dystopia coexist simultaneously. Marcuse draws on romantic poet Friedrich Schiller to conceptualize aesthetic experience as the realization of a free, utopian life existing alongside a dystopian reality. However, while Schiller envisions aesthetic education as a pathway to achieving the political ideal, Marcuse contends that the aesthetic dimension lacks the capacity to transform actual dystopian conditions. Rancière, for his part, critiques utopias framed in the distant future as ultimately perpetuating existing inequalities. Instead, his “method of equality” suggests an alternative: one can experience equality and inequality, utopia and dystopia, simultaneously—exemplified by a worker having an aesthetic experience while laboring. By connecting aesthetic experience to the time of scholè, I argue that school similarly enables the coexistence of utopia and dystopia, and point to the possibility of tipping the balance towards utopia.

In Cinema II by Gilles Deleuze, the time-image, there is a chapter (4) called, the ‘crystals of time’. Deleuze’s chapter puts forward the thesis that there is discernible in cinema moments wherein time is in-between an internal or virtual state, where it could be said to be an attribute of the unconscious and likened to a dream-state, and an external or actual state, where time is an objective aspect of the world, that may be understood, for example, as ‘clock-time’. It is in these in-between times that ‘time-in-itself’ becomes discernible, as in Tarkovsky’s Solaris, in which the voyagers are trapped in an internal state by the unexpected manipulation of the strange new planet, or as the author’s perception-memory in his film, Mirror. Dreams are mixed up with external waking hours, life has become a ‘crystal-image’, whereby the characters are unable to discern whether life is real or imaginary, truth or fiction. Beyond a metaphor, the ‘crystal-image’, wherein time oscillates between memory and future-apparition, describes how we are schooled from the earliest days to university, and drawn along modernist lines of progress, efficiency, high cognitive functioning and the pursuit of capital, and are exposed to the realities of the digital panoply, neoliberal ruthlessness, ecological catastrophe, and one world capitalism. In sum, the teaching and learning that we are engulfed in from birth comes from the past, the Holocene, wherein human growth was possible, yet we have arrived in the Anthropocene, a retrogressive state, with human reality falling apart under pressure from its own impulses (like a crystal).

This review provides a critical analysis of the emerging role of video games in higher education, with a specific focus on their theoretical foundations, practical implications, and potential areas for future research. The author posits that despite the potential benefits of video games in promoting student engagement and enhancing learning outcomes, the integration of these games into higher education curricula faces significant theoretical and practical challenges that have not been adequately explored in current scholarly works. Through the synthesis and critical analysis of recent research, this review highlights the significant tensions that arise when attempting to implement game-based learning in higher education settings, despite its perceived benefits. This review conducts a systematic literature review and employs a well-established thematic analysis framework. The author has identified five crucial areas that necessitate additional investigation. These include the epistemological underpinnings of game-based learning, the assessment of long-term learning outcomes, the equity implications of game-based education, the integration of emerging technologies, and the development of game design frameworks tailored for higher education. The purpose of this review is to stimulate a more nuanced and critical discussion regarding the impact of video games in higher education. This entails transcending techno-optimism and embracing a more theoretically informed and empirically substantiated perspective.

Recently, there has been a greater emphasis, especially inspired by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), on the creation of educational policy that appears to want to control the future. This is evidenced by promoting an engineering fantasy in/for education that embodies positive universalism. We critically examine such positive universalism by drawing on the notion of negative universality (Kapoor & Zalloua, 2022ab) along with concepts of fantasy, desire and sublime objects (Žižek, 1989), and Rosa (2020) cultural criticism. We illustrate our concepts through the story of a skiing holiday where the fantasy of the perfect snowscape always fails to deliver what it promises. Here, travellers who desire the experience of skiing on ‘perfect snow’ are seduced by powerful advertising campaigns. Due to the unpredictability of nature, travellers are often faced with intrusive snow machines that noisily – and in a ‘vulgar’ way – engineer and manufacture the snowscape which spoils and punctures the fantasy of the perfect skiing conditions. Our paper critically examines the OECD’s (2019b) Learning Compass 2030 document, discussing the universal engineering fantasy that promises to produce certainty, moral improvement and control in/with education. We also analyse the accompanying OECD’s attitudes and values document (OECD, 2019a) that identifies a list of sublime objects such as respect, justice and Bildung to which all countries must aspire if they wish to succeed. We conclude that the policy documents of the OECD present a positive universal engineering fantasy that promises a non-antagonistic and harmonious future. However, such a future will be impossible to achieve. Hence, we call for educators to critically engage with negative universality to expose the lacks and contradictions always inherent in global policies. This would provide educators with an opportunity to reflect on and critically confront seductive policy and its engineering fantasy that captures their desires.

This article brings Abbas Kiarostami’s Where Is the Friend’s House? into dialogue with Emmanuel Levinas’s ethical philosophy to critically examine the film’s pedagogical implications. At the surface, the film follows a young boy’s (Ahmad) apparently simple quest to return a classmate’s notebook. This quest turns into a journey that evolves into a quietly powerful confrontation with the structures of institutional authority. Drawing on Levinas’s notion of subjectivity as inherently grounded in responsibility for the Other, the film is interpreted as staging an ethical awakening that is not embraced freely, but placed upon the subject, disrupting the totalizing logic of obedience entrenched in familial and educational systems. We argue that Ahmad’s refusal to yield to these systems’ demands is not an act of childish obstinacy, but rather a subtle yet subversive challenge to the pedagogical machinery that not only denies individuality, but is essentially driven by homogeneity. By analyzing the dynamics between anxiety, responsibility and disobedience, this article argues that the film presents a poetic yet profound critique of education as a site of normalization, while simultaneously offering a model of ethical subjectivity constituted through substitution, and failure. The failure to “achieve” the aim – Ahmad never finds the friend’s house – is understood as the condition for a non-utilitarian ethics.

In this paper I argue that the ways that we teach about plants are limited by long standing conceptions of them as insensitive and noncommunicative. Science can provide insights from research into plants, however, the extent of the change to our thinking that would be needed to address this limitation can best be brough about through more creative means. I suggest that the deep-seated and long-established misconceptions of plants can be effectively addressed through Storytelling. I explore the idea that humans’ relationship with plants can be understood as colonization, and look to Science Fiction, finding an example of this in The Day of the Triffids (1951) by John Wyndham. Storytelling and specifically the speculative narratives of Science Fiction are argued to offer us a means of changing our minds about plants, whilst also offering approaches to how to teach and learn about them differently. Stories are proposed as a tool for reconsidering entrenched values and beliefs, offering a means of challenging established ways of thinking about plants, and releasing us to consider why how we teach about plants matters – not just for education, but for our future.

This paper explores the role of counterfactual thought in educational theory by proposing a heuristic that distinguishes between two modes: ‘As if’ and ‘What if’. We begin by grounding the discussion in philosophical debates on language, imagination, and fictionality, before introducing the heuristic, which situates these modes within a broader typology of relations to reality. We then elaborate two exemplary figurations – axioms for ‘As if’ and Science Fiction for ‘What if’ – to demonstrate how counterfactual thinking operates in educational theory and as educational theory. A final discussion assesses the heuristic’s analytical, clarificatory, and generative value. We conclude that educational theory is inherently imaginative and that counterfactual modes of thought are essential to its capacity to critique the present and envision alternative futures.

This article compares and contrasts two approaches to utopianism in educational theory. On the one hand, there is weak utopianism, which focuses on open-ended experimentation with potentialities existing in the present moment. On the other hand, there is strong utopianism which focuses on envisioning and mapping large-scale social transformations. Despite their differences, underlying both is an investment in thinking about infrastructure. A comparison between the author’s analysis of the social implications of corners in classrooms versus the strong utopian plans of Ivan Illich’s convivial society illustrates differences between weak and strong utopianism in educational theory while also highlighting the distinct though largely unacknowledged role of infrastructure within these utopian projects. The paper suggests that utopian desire--weak and strong--avoids topophobic (empty) utopian speculation by engaging in infrastructural experimentation, and then concludes with implications for rethinking the education of utopian desire from an infrastructural perspective.

This article introduces and critically frames the Special Issue Teachers and Teaching in a Shifting Landscape of Education: A Global Perspective by examining how teacher work is being reshaped in response to escalating policy demands, socio-political instability, and systemic disruption. Drawing on contributions from seven national contexts, it identifies three core tensions that characterize contemporary teaching: between autonomy and systemic control, individual and collective professionalism, and stability and disruption. Rather than offering a descriptive overview, the article develops a comparative analytical framework to interpret how teacher agency, motivation, and collaboration emerge under divergent governance regimes and crisis conditions. By foregrounding the role of trust, institutional culture, and socio-emotional dynamics, the article argues for a relational and context-sensitive understanding of teacher professionalism. It concludes by calling for research that not only compares systems, but also captures the embedded, negotiated, and affective nature of teaching in times of transformation.

This conceptual paper brings together scholarship on climate coloniality and affective injustice to propose a reframing of climate justice education (CJE) that foregrounds the affective dimension of the climate crisis. In particular, the paper introduces the concept of affective climate injustice to capture how climate change not only devastates environments and livelihoods but also inflicts profound emotional harm. Emotions such as grief, rage, and exhaustion are unequally distributed and often delegitimized, particularly when voiced by marginalized communities, including Indigenous peoples, racialized groups, and those in the Global South. By advancing the notion of affective climate injustice as an analytic lens, the paper suggests that CJE can more fully acknowledge these asymmetries and cultivate practices of care and relationality. Such an approach offers alternative pathways for advancing climate justice, especially in contexts where direct discourses are under attack. The paper highlights the theoretical and pedagogical implications of this framework for reimagining CJE.