Keywords
Affinity and persona – a person’s associations and the way they envision themself, including religion, politics, affinity groups and personality types.
Age – a determinant of bodily and mental capacities, and the relevant and appropriate forms of social interaction and learning at each age level.
Analysing critically – evaluating critically your own and other people’s perspectives, interests and motives.
Analysing functionally – analysing logical connections, cause and effect, structure and function.
Applying appropriately – applying insights to real-world situations and testing their validity.
Applying creatively – making an intervention in the world that is innovative and creative.
Architectonic – the physical settings of schools, their buildings and the spaces in which teachers teach and learners learn.
Assessment – the process of measuring learner performance.
Assimilation – maintaining a group’s sameness by establishing a condition that, to be accepted, people who are different must become ‘normal’ or like the dominant group.
Authentic – Learning that is authentic sets out to be of relevance to the lives of learners and to have demonstrably practical uses. Such learning is authentic insofar as it is learner- or child-centred, true to the interests and motivations of the learner. It is also authentic for its focus on internalised understanding rather than memorised, formal correctness.
Behaviourism – a theory and research science of learning that observes behaviour in animals and humans in order to study the relationships between ‘stimulus’, ‘response’ and ‘reinforcement’.
Belonging – a person’s identity in relation to the state, and how the state deals with the differences among its citizens.
Body form – physical and mental attributes that may affect a person’s way of life and identity, such as tall or short, ‘fat’ or ‘thin’, or ‘disability’ or ability.
Brain developmentalism – the study of the physiology of the brain, or interpreting brain development in terms of the stages of a child’s cognitive development; also studying language to infer ‘hard-wired’ patterns of meaning and forms of thinking.
Bureaucratic – learning organisations that are run according to rules and ordered by hierarchy; a setting where teachers and learners can attain ‘assisted’ competence, or teaching and learning that relies on sources of authority.
Canonical truths – the idea that the highest forms of human culture and knowledge are to be found in bodies of knowledge, theories and great texts – the best of what has been thought and said.
Citizenship – a condition of belonging to a political community governed by a state. In a democracy, citizens elect representatives who are responsible for governance of the state. Citizens are also required to adhere to the laws of the state.
Civic pluralism – a relationship between the state and civil society in which there are many overlapping sites of citizenship to which responsibility is devolved, and where the local and global autonomy of diverse groups requires the constant negotiation of differences.
Civics – a relationship of belonging to a self-governing group.
Civil society – ordinary people going about their everyday lives, associating with each other voluntarily.
Collaborative – learning organisations that conceive themselves to be knowledge-producing communities:
• where trust is established in teachers’ capacities to create learning designs
• where learners are expected to engage with negotiated learning tasks
• where teachers and learners can form grounded, ‘out-there’ relations that extend beyond the walls of the institution
• where learners and teachers can attain ‘collaborative’ competence, learning by contributing from their own lifeworld experience, constructing knowledge with their peers, and connecting their new knowledge back into a variety of lifeworld applications.
Committed knowledge – ways of knowing that clearly present themselves as more powerful, effective and correct in their outcomes in comparison with others; for example, religious truths, empirical truths, psychological truths, rationalist truths and canonical truths.
Conceptualising by naming – developing categories and defining terms.
Conceptualising with theory – putting the key terms together into theories and making generalisations.
Corporeal attributes – bodily realities, such as age, race, sex and sexuality, and physical and mental abilities.
Cultural relativism – the idea that knowledge is created in a cultural context, and that because no culture can regard itself as any better than any other, no knowledge can be regarded as superior.
Culture – defined narrowly as ethnicity, nationality or ancestry, or broadly as human social-symbolic activity.
Curriculum – the consciously designed framework for learning a body of knowledge or a set of capacities over an extended period of time; for instance, a term’s program in history or a two-year program in chemistry.
Curriculum – ties together the micro-sequences of pedagogy into larger frameworks of courses, subjects and disciplines.
Diagnostic assessment – to find out what a learner already knows and needs to learn.
Didactic – Being didactic means to spell things out explicitly but perhaps a little too laboriously, or to present a view of what’s true or right or valued but in a way that might, at times, seem dogmatic. So, the teacher tells and the learner listens. Didactic teaching turns on what the teacher says rather than what the learner does. The balance of agency weighs heavily towards the teacher. The teacher is in command of knowledge. The teacher’s mission is to transmit this knowledge to learners, and learners, it is hoped, will dutifully absorb the knowledge laid before them by the teacher.
Discursive – the ways in which we communicate with each other using language in schools.
Education – a series of institutions and a scientific discipline concerned with premeditated and systematic learning. In the modern world, the institutions of education are formally constructed places (classrooms), times (of the day and of life) and social relations (teachers and students); for instance, schools and colleges and universities. The scientific discipline of education is the systematic investigation of the ways in which humans know and learn. People training to be professional educators study the science of education.
Empirical truths – the idea that the truth of the world can be obtained through systematic observation, experimentation and verification of ‘facts’.
Employment – the work one does to earn a paid income, from industrial wage workers to portfolio workers.
Epistemological – the ways in which we know.
Epistemological relativism – the idea that everyone’s way of knowing, and other people’s, is just a matter of perspective, and that no one way of knowing is necessarily any better than any other.
Evaluation – a process of measuring the effectiveness of programs, curricula, interventions and teachers.
Exclusion – maintaining a group’s sameness by keeping out those who are different.
Experiencing the known – reflecting on one’s own experiences, interests and perspectives.
Experiencing the new – observing the unfamiliar, immersing oneself in new situations, and reading and recording new facts and data.
Family – relationships of cohabitation and childrearing, such as nuclear, extended and blended families.
Fordism – a system of work that begins with modern industry, involving a division of labour that requires minimal skills on the part of workers, strict managerial hierarchy, vertical lines of command and the mass production of uniform products destined for mass consumption.
Formal learning – deliberate, conscious, systematic and explicit learning; the kind of learning we call ‘education’.
Formative assessment – to provide a learner with feedback while they are learning.
Gendre – symbolic or cultural attributes ascribed to and associated with sex and sexuality, such as feminine and masculine roles and identities.
Inclusion – a process of making people feel they belong in their difference, and making those differences an integral and productive part of the social activity.
Informal learning – casual learning in the lifeworld: intrinsic, arising from within and to be found throughout, and incidental to everyday life experience.
Intersubjective – the ways in which the teachers and learners relate, expressing their wills, motivations, interests and drives. How much space the learner has to express themselves, or comply with the commands of the teacher.
Knowledge – the mental stuff inside your head, and a lot more outside. The mental stuff consists of memories of experience and thinking activities that make sense of these experiences. Knowledge is also outside your head – the stuff of your sensuous experience of your body in the world, and knowledge that is at the ready as you need it. The knowledge in your head would be nothing without its connections with what is outside your head. Knowledge, then, is everywhere.
Knowledge repertoires – the idea that you can do a variety of things to know, or use a variety of knowledge processes. Some mixes of different knowledge processes may be more appropriate for some areas of knowledge or sites of learning than others. The more knowledge processes you use in a particular task of knowing or learning, the more reliable and trustworthy the knowledge is likely to be. And whatever the mix, the knowledge maker or learner can demonstrate their knowing and learning more convincingly when they can justify their methods. For example: experiencing the known, experiencing the new, conceptualisingby naming, conceptualising with theory, analysing functionally, analysing critically, applying appropriately or applying creatively.
Language – the human symbol-making systems of speaking and writing.
Learning – a capacity to know new things and to do new things as a consequence of lived experience and social action. Learning is an integral part of our human natures. Learning happens across the length and breadth of human lives.
Learning civility – the changing role of the institutions of education in shaping the values and capacities of its citizens.
Lifeworld – everyday life experience; the things that go without saying and do not need to be taught; the stuff of identity and subjectivity.
Locale – geographical location and the resources and opportunities offered by locations; for instance, different neighbourhoods in a city, a rural or remote versus urban location, different regions in a country, or a developed versus a developing country.
Management – the social organisation of work, which can take different forms and involve
different kinds of human relationships, from authoritarian hierarchy to shared responsibility.
Markets – products and services created in a workplace and offered for sale, and places where workers use their wages to purchase products and services – from uniform mass markets to varied niche markets.
Material conditions – differences in access to wealth and social resources, which may be the result of social class, geographical locale or family context.
Mimesis – learning by copying: memorising facts, replicating theories and absorbing canonical knowledge.
Moral – the values and social meanings that underlie our thoughts, words and actions.
Nationalism – a relationship between the state and civil society in which the state plays a dominant part in society and has a paternalistic or command-and-compliance relationship with citizens. The guiding narrative of the nationalist state is one people, one history, one territory. The differences that the nationalist state encounters are dealt with by processes of exclusion or assimilation.
Neoliberalism – a relationship between the state and civil society in which the state plays a diminishing role in society, allowing markets to determine social outcomes and requiring individuals to be responsible for their own lives and groups to regulate themselves.
Pedagogical – the ways in which we learn.
Pedagogy – small sequences of learner activity that promote learning, one kind of move after the other; for instance, reading an historical document then interpreting what it means, or conducting a chemistry experiment, then drawing conclusions.
Pedagogy – a consciously designed sequence of activities for knowing with a narrative structure, the purpose of which is to build knowledge or knowledge-making capabilities.
Post-Fordism – a system of work that comes with increasing automation in which workers are multi-skilled, work in teams, share more management responsibility and engage in more lateral communications. The organisation is considered to be a corporate culture, where workers are supposed to fit into shared values.
Postmodernism – a theory that questions whether any knowledge systems should view themselves as superior, including the Western ‘enlightenment’ and scientific rationality. The voices of marginalised groups and the popular culture of the mass media culture, for instance, may be equally valid as sources of knowledge.
Power – the balance of agency between individuals and classes of individuals, those who command and those who comply. The nationalist state tends to promote power relations of command and compliance. The state of civic pluralism involves a shift towards flatter and more balanced relationships of agency and power.
Productive diversity – a system of work in which primary value is located in human skills and knowledge, work group and client relationships, and continuous organisational learning. Local and global differences are used as a productive resource, and products and services customised for niche markets.
Proprietary – patterns of ownership and control of knowledge involving teachers and learners.
Qualitative research – showing the details of educational relationships (for instance, in a case study involving an individual or a group) and using multiple perspectives.
Quantitative research – having enough people undertaking a piece of research to be able to prove the effect of an approach or intervention.
Race – differences in physical appearance, between one human population and another: skin colour, facial features, hair colour and texture, height and physique.
Rationalist truths – the idea that human reason makes sense of the world.
Recognition – when differences are named, people are classified and at least minimal measures are taken to deal with these differences.
Reflexivity – moving between different ways of knowing, with learners as active makers of knowledge in well-designed learning environments.
Religious truths – the idea that absolute and ultimate truth derives from a supreme being who created the universe, governs its course and sets ethical parameters for humans. Religious truth is revealed through religious texts, prophets and priests.
Research – building knowledge about educational programs and interventions in their broad social context, knowledge that can be transferred from one setting to another.
Science – the deeper kinds of knowing that are more reliable and trustworthy because they have involved greater focus and methodical effort than everyday, casual or commonsense knowing in the lifeworld.
Selected response assessment – where the test-taker is provided with a limited number of answers from which to select, only one of which is correct.
Self-managing – learning organisations that devolve a degree of self-governance to individuals and groups; a setting where teachers and learners can attain ‘autonomous’ competence; or teaching based on a degree of ‘self-management’ and learning based on the personal construction of knowledge.
Services – what the state provides for citizens, such as education. What is provided and how it is provided changes according to the states of nationalism, neoliberalism and civic pluralism.
Sex and sexuality – sex is the biologically inherited aspect of male/female difference, and sexuality is constituted of forms of attraction and liaison, such as heterosexuality and homosexuality.
Skills – learned human physical and mental capacities.
Social class – a material or economic measure of wealth, power and status in an unequal and hierarchically ordered social structure.
Social cognitivism – the study of the role of culture and nurture in learning, grounded in the biological affordances of body and brain.
Society – everyday community life, including work and education, and the mutual infl uences of one area of life upon another.
Socio-cultural – the life experiences, social backgrounds and cultures that teachers and learners come from; the pressures exerted on them by school to be the same or the opportunities to build upon their diversity.
Standards-based assessment – looking for student learning as measured in terms of general learning objectives: disciplinary performance and content understanding.
State – makes and enforces laws with the assistance of institutions, such as the army, police force, courts and various departments of government administration.
Summative assessment – an artefact that samples student knowledge at the end of a program of learning, to provide a retrospective view of what has been learned.
Supply response assessment – where the test-taker can provide an answer represented in their own words, images, etc.
Symbolic differences – socially constructed realities of culture, language, gender, family, affinity and persona, based on the human propensity to make meaning and sense of their encounters with the world in creatively varied ways.
Synergistic feedback – educational knowledge systems that give learners, teachers and communities rapid and useful feedback on learning and learning organisations.
Synthesis – deconstructing knowledge in order to understand its inner workings, in order to be able to reconstruct it the ‘right’ way. Also, reflecting subjectivity, perspective and identity without necessarily moving the learner into new realms of knowledge and social possibility.
Technology – tools used for work and everyday living, including machines, physical structures, and information and communication systems.
Test reliability – whether a test consistently produces accurate results.
Test validity – whether a test is relevant to what students have learned.
Transformative – Transformative education is based on a reading of contemporary society and the kinds of capacities for knowing that children need to develop in order to be good workers in a ‘knowledge economy’, participating citizens in a globalised, cosmopolitan society, and balanced personalities in a society that affords a range of choices that, at times, seems overwhelming. The essence of education is transformation of self and environment, which may be pragmatic (enabling learners to do their best in the given social conditions) or emancipatory (making the world a better place).