Educational Philosophy and Theory

As Indigenous outward migration expands, some diaspora groups are larger than their population back home which is the case for many in the Pacific diaspora. Research with Indigenous peoples is largely conducted in their homelands, with minimal research on their experiences in other countries. As Pacific Indigenous academics, we employed a dimension of talanoa in the written form to provide insights into our academic journeys. The direction of the talanoa highlight how we have successfully navigated various spaces in relation to decolonising and Indigenising education, and our intentions for standing in solidarity with the native people of the countries in which we reside. This article adds voice to Indigenous communities in diaspora who have been invisible both in the motherland and new homeland. It is envisioned that this work will add to Indigenous education scholarship, and better inform academic and professional practice.

Despite the success of critical race theory (CRT) in bringing about an intellectual movement that profoundly influenced the setting of a racial justice agenda in educational research since its inception 30 years ago, the material racial inequity still prevails and continues to subordinate people from racialized communities in and beyond the classroom. As such, it is time that we re-examine the way CRT has been interpreted and applied in educational research to better fulfill CRT’s promise of racial justice. The rise of the current wave of anti-racism movements presents a critical moment for such re-examination. This article therefore examines the current and potential engagement with CRT in educational research by analyzing and theorizing CRT-informed social movement learning to illustrate how we can fully realize the anti-racism potential of CRT in educational research. What we learn from the various forms of learning in the anti-racism movements suggest that a combination of anti-racism voices and practices is vital to mobilize learning as enactment of multiple forms of agency to combat racism through critical creative anti-racism struggles. Future CRT educational research can further recognize CRT as an integrated and evolving framework in which the centering of race and racism to illuminate multiple nexus of subordination serves as a starting point to develop anti-racism strategies and that CRT educational research can embrace a form of criticality against racism as practices of critique and creation of alternatives.

ABSTRACT Education is concerned with the production of intelligence. Is AI intelligent? and what are the implications for educating humanity? Samuel Butler makes the case that machinery emerges in co-relation with the evolution of humanity. In other words, the evolution of machines relies on the human intervention for reproduction, and the evolution of human epistemology is shaped by the emergence of machines. Pre-empting themes of posthumanism over 150 years ago, Butler teases out the notion of intelligence in the evolution and communication of plants, animals, and machines. Stiegler worries that the rapid acceleration of automation, especially the emergence of the algorithms of artificial intelligence are disrupting the modern economic system by rupturing the relation between work and wages. Escalating entropy is overtaking the ordering of modernity. Education needs to engage with the contextual changes in modern expectations about work, as well as educational changes in thinking and learning.

In this paper, we argue that the attempts to centre education in one of its three constitutive aspects that have long determined the discourse on the purpose and aims of education run the risk of one-sidedness. Theories of student-centred education have been in vogue for many centuries now, having been born out of a polemic against teacher-centred education which focuses on knowledge transfer. In turn, recent thing-centred or world-centred accounts of education polemicize against student-centred accounts and their privileging of individual learning processes. However, each side of this multifaceted polemic is one-sided in its own way, and this has held back not only theories of education, but also educational practice. We argue that educational theorising that is not attentive to all three aspects and dimensions of educational practices – teacher, student, and world – will ultimately lead to a poorer understanding of the purpose and aims of education. Here, we argue with Hannah Arendt that educational love must be polyamorous.

Cognitive load theory (CLT), a construct of instructional psychologist John Sweller, has long been a mainstay of educational psychology and university educational technology courses, regionally and internationally. Although aspects of this cognitivist theory have been severely criticised, including its insistence on direct instruction in opposition to inquiry-based pedagogies, a comprehensive philosophical, neurobiological, and education critique has been missing. This paper fills the gap, by subjecting the main theoretical and pedagogical claims of CLT to close and searching scrutiny, in part, utilising a newly emerging synthesis of philosophy and cognitive brain science, appropriately known as Cognitive Philosophy. The paper pushes past CLT, with its emphasis on the transient nature of working memory and core notion of cognitive ‘load’, to propose an account of the learning brain that is predictive (not reactive), embodied, neuronally plastic, non-linear, dynamically self-organising, and inherently emotional. This alternative account immediately problematises Sweller’s understanding of working memory and his account of language learning, based on Geary’s questionable epistemological claims, while keeping the practical needs of teachers and teacher educators firmly in view. Armed with this alternative, teachers can move beyond the theoretical and pedagogical constraints of CLT, including trying to mitigate a putative ‘load’ in working memory.