This theoretical paper responds to concerns surrounding the fracturing and opaqueness of the term “sustainability” and the related metaphysical crisis that underpins an existential polycrisis. Drawing on Nietzsche’s work on order and disorder (1873, 1901), Latour’s (2013) philosophical anthropology of modernity and Rosa’s (2019) theory of resonance, the author proposes a way of considering sustainability pluralistically, as a crucial mode of existence amongst others. Revisiting the dualism of subject/object, the author proposes a more implicated, associative way of viewing how humans and non-humans relate, introducing the term sobject: interpolated, entangled being(s). As this mode of existence is explicated, the paper articulates how this could be useful in an educational sense. What is proposed is a way to “zone in” to sustainability with students; a mode through which we can learn to see our connections to and within the world, through which we can actively renew the many-pronged path of Earthly existence. Authentic transformation of dysfunctional existence on Earth, this paper argues, will not arise from harmony or consensus but from engaging the generative dissonances through which we might move beyond perpetual reconsideration of “sustainability” towards the active reconfiguration of how we live, learn and co-create a more inhabitable world.

This article examines cases of governors who established a foundation for school choice between 1980 and 1996. Education was a strategic issue around which they sought to alleviate economic concerns and anxieties about desegregation to realize their vision of building, yet again, a New South. As part of this process, southern governors extolled the values of the free market in deracialized ways and networked to pass comprehensive education reform grounded in neoliberal ideologies including individualism and competition.

This essay reflects on my research and teaching on the history of gender and education, specifically with respect to the schooling history of Chinese women in the colonial world. In doing so, it aims to propose an alternate way of seeing the silent and missing figures in the colonial archives: the subordinated, marginalized, feminine colonial subjects. Commonly framed as orphaned, wounded, and diseased bodies in the historical research on the colonial era, these women were rendered as part of the “problem” that the colonial government ought to fix. It was through “them,” the disenfranchised Chinese females, that the missionary and the colonial state found their meaning and purpose. By the early twentieth century, although Chinese women’s education in the colonial context shifted from a discourse of evangelization to one of modernization, the function of women’s schooling remained constant: The feminine figure was still a platform through which the colonial government projected much of its civilizing ambition and desires for modernity. However, if one reads beyond the colonial archives and the paradigm of colonial subject as “recipient” and focuses instead on the archives of everyday life, one can see Chinese feminine figures as the triumphant masters of modern life. This essay traces this paradigm shift and argues that “gender” is an analytical tool capable of unearthing the hidden figures of modernity.

Given the potential of generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) to create human clones, it is not surprising that chatbots have been implemented in politics. In a turbulent political context, these AI-driven bots are likely to be used to spread biased information, amplify polarisation, and distort our memories. Large language models (LLMs) lack ‘political memory’ and cannot accurately process political discourses that draw from collective political memory. We refer to research concerning collective political memory and AI to present our observations of a chatbot experiment undertaken during the Presidential Elections in Finland in early 2024. This election took place at a historically crucial moment, as Finland, traditionally an advocate of neutrality and peacefulness, had become a vocal supporter of Ukraine and a new member state of NATO. Our research team developed LLM-driven chatbots for all presidential candidates, and Finnish citizens were afforded the chance to engage with these chatbot–politicians. In our study, human–chatbot discussions related to foreign and security politics were especially interesting. While rhetorically very typical and believable in light of real political speech, chatbots reorganised prevailing discourses generating responses that distorted the collective political memory. In actuality, Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine had drastically changed Finland’s political positioning. Our AI-driven chatbots, or ‘electobots’, continued to promote constructive dialogue with Russia, thus earning our moniker ‘Finlandised Bots’. Our experiment highlights that training AI for political purposes requires familiarity with the prevailing discourses and attunement to the nuances of the context, showcasing the importance of studying human–machine interactions beyond the typical viewpoint of disinformation.

In this research agenda, we first review the thematic landscape of task engagement research, providing definitions and elaborating on the core theoretical infrastructure for task engagement. We then summarize consensus perspectives from this body of work and identify important contributions that task engagement research stands to make to second language (L2) learning and teaching research. Following this, we outline five key research tasks that we believe will broaden the field’s understanding of task engagement, sharpen insights from empirical work, and accelerate the contribution of this research. Our goals are, first, to highlight for readers the shared understandings that exist in this important area of language learning research and, second, to draw attention to specific areas where additional L2 task engagement research is needed to push the field forward productively.

The study explored physical education teacher educators’ (PETE educators) perspectives on integrating sustainable development (SD) imperatives within PETE courses. Nine PETE educators participated in a nine-month professional learning project featuring six workshops and seminars promoting reflection, peer discussion and dialogic encounters. The PETE educators designed pedagogical interventions based on their teaching practices, selecting teaching units where SD perspectives could be integrated. Data included intervention papers, audio-recorded sessions and logbooks, analysed descriptively and thematically. The proposed interventions focused on inclusion, equality and lifelong physical activity, and typically included lectures, seminars, student-centred teaching, reflections and assignments. Challenges included contextualising SD in PETE, framing SD goals, integrating SD content and addressing its normative nature. The study offers insights into the potential of integrating SD perspectives in PETE, highlights associated challenges, and calls for further research to bridge theory and practice.

This forum contribution considers the complexities and importance of gender in the historiography of LGBTQ+ college students. After a brief introduction, we focus on four key areas in the existing historiography: women’s romantic relationships in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, higher education leaders’ enforcement of gender norms and purges of LGBTQ+ students through the mid-twentieth century, the gender dynamics within LGBTQ+ student organizations from the 1970s onward, and trans and other LGBTQ+ students’ expansion of gender possibilities, including through the use of drag. In so doing, we argue that gender analysis is important to the historiography of LGBTQ+ students, though most often that analysis has been implicit rather than explicit. Considering both the gaps in our historical knowledge and the rising attacks on LGBTQ+ individuals, we contend that continued gendered analyses are not only warranted but also needed.

This study developed and evaluated an online English speaking training approach that integrates corpora and artificial intelligence (AI) tools. The training integrated a self-developed spoken corpus, generative AI tools, and text-to-speech AI tools. Pre- and post-test results identified improvements in participants’ speaking performances. Participants attempted to use more positive linguistic features (e.g. producing complex sentences more frequently) and avoid using negative linguistic features (e.g. reducing the number of vowel errors) after receiving the training. Participants showed positive attitudes towards this corpus-based and AI-integrated English oral ability learning approach and affirmed the importance of integrating both tools. The corpus helped raise participants’ awareness of features that influence speaking performance and offered prompt engineering and feedback-checking functions, while the generative AI tools provided useful feedback and tailor-made sample responses. Additionally, text-to-speech AI tools offered learners with tailor-made native speaker samples for imitation and helped learners learn pausing. Results also revealed that this approach helped create an interactive oral ability learning environment, and the combination of corpora and AI tools provided more accurate feedback for each subskill of speaking.

This study investigated the impact of familiar versus unfamiliar environments on mobile-assisted language learning (MALL) task writing performance, English as a foreign language (EFL) writing proficiency, and learner perceptions. Fifty undergraduate students were divided into an experimental group and a control group. Both groups engaged in EFL learning in the classroom and later completed writing tasks in different learning environments outside the classroom: the experimental group in familiar environments and the control group in unfamiliar ones. Using a mobile learning system on tablet PCs, students completed five writing tasks describing resources in their environments, such as objects, people, situations, and scenarios. We assessed MALL task writing performance based on factors including the amount of writing, content quality, organization, creativity, grammar, and vocabulary, and compared results between the two groups. EFL writing proficiency was evaluated through a post-test directly related to the MALL tasks, and student perceptions of the MALL experience were measured through a survey. The results indicated that the experimental group outperformed the control group in both writing tasks and the post-test. Furthermore, the experimental group reported more positive perceptions of their MALL experience, reflected in higher emotional engagement and cognitive involvement. Based on these findings, we offer both theoretical insights into the role of familiar environments in facilitating language learning and practical suggestions for EFL teachers and researchers to incorporate real-world, contextually rich environments in MALL activities.

Humanity is facing a confluence of existential environmental and material crises threatening socio-economic sustainability and the web of life that predicates human existence. At the same time, the erosion of spiritual, social, political and economic assemblages is undermining social cohesion, the fabric of democratic societies and humanity’s ability to change course. The dynamics in which humanity now finds itself has been termed the metacrisis, an embodiment of a mythical, all-consuming Moloch, emerging from collective akratic actions. Here, the consequences of the metacrisis for education are discussed from Rupert Read’s (2017) thrutopian perspective, which sidesteps the paralysis arising from dystopian laments and major-utopian fantasies. This paper argues for a thrutopian curriculum that enacts Read’s call for attention to the present and a focus on adaptation through resilience building, environmental care, positive relations and enjoyment of the possible. Such a curriculum confronts dystopian visions as no longer avoidable challenges while pulling utopian concepts from the permanent deferral inherent in major utopias down to minor-utopian realisations in the daily here-and-now of adaptive survival. The paper contends that thrutopian thinking can empower curriculum writing, teaching and environmental education and defuse the rise of debilitating crisis anxiety across the age spectrum.

As the planet confronts an interconnected meta-crisis linked to natural, political, social, and psychological challenges, there are some pedagogical tendencies that should be challenged within university education. Drawing on the philosophical literature of the Ecological University, this article uses an eco-philosophical framework for considering mainstream university pedagogy. We emphasise that the increasing mental health challenges of so many young people at university is both a symptom and a feature of the meta-crisis and a key consideration for how we might respond as university educators. We argue that many of the existing neoliberal and liberal tendencies in university can be interpreted as “Miserable Pedagogies” — which typically fail to engage with the meta-crisis as a threat to the planet’s psychological, social, political, or natural ecosystems. We suggest that our “pedagogies of misery” need to be disrupted and radically contested with an ecological world-view we describe as “Anthropocene Intelligence.” After setting out the key features of Anthropocene Intelligence, we consider how an alternative teaching approach, used by one of the authors, reflects such an ecological worldview and potentially provides a basis for more meaningful and active ways of being and learning on this finite planet.

Learners’ confidence in using a second language (L2 self-efficacy) and their L2 grit are key psychological factors in developing intercultural competence (ICC). As English as a foreign language (EFL) students increasingly encounter diverse cultures though informal digital learning of English (IDLE), this study examines whether IDLE serves as a pathway connecting these psychological traits to ICC. Grounded in the broaden-and-build theory, this explanatory mixed-methods research investigates how L2 self-efficacy and grit contribute to ICC through IDLE among 416 Chinese EFL students. Structural equation modeling revealed that higher L2 self-efficacy fosters greater L2 grit, which in turn promotes more frequent engagement in both receptive IDLE activities (e.g. watching English media) and productive ones (e.g. participating in online conversations). This increased engagement was positively linked to higher levels of ICC. Qualitative findings further illuminated the mechanisms behind this process, illustrating how psychological strengths support meaningful digital encounters across cultures. The findings offer pedagogical insights: by cultivating students’ self-efficacy and grit, educators can encourage deeper engagement in IDLE, thereby equipping learners with effective and culturally sensitive communication in an increasingly interconnected digital world.

As a field, the history of education contains scant analyses of power, deprivation, or privilege from a white, patriarchal, or masculine viewpoint, a concerning limitation that obscures how power works to reinscribe, sustain, and proliferate itself. This claim reflects that to some degree, gender is racialized and race is gendered. To support this contention, I discuss the small body of history of education scholarship that has interrogated white, masculine, and/or patriarchal power, highlighting in particular the work of feminist scholars of Color.1 I also underscore what we as a field might gain in analyzing masculine, patriarchal, and/or white power with the same fervor many pay to racially, ethnically, and sexually marginalized communities, pointing out some seminal works and figures that stand to be further enhanced by gendered or racial analysis. I end with questions that could inform research directions toward these ends.