The Occupation of Japan (1945-1952) sought to democratize the nation’s education system; pupil guidance was expected to play a key part of this process. American reformers promoted new guidance practices (e.g., the comprehensive collection of students’ personal data, guidance interventions based on the case-study method, an expanded homeroom curriculum) that emphasized the psychological adjustment—translated as tekio (適応)—of students to school and society in a new Japan. By tracing the evolution of prewar and postwar Japanese guidance discourse, this study examines how American pupil guidance’s emphasis on student adjustment interacted with, and transformed, twentieth-century Japanese education. Drawing from prewar, Occupation-era and post-independence sources, the essay explores three points. First, by comparing prewar life guidance with Occupation-era and post-independence pupil guidance, it emphasizes the important changes effected by tekio-oriented guidance during the late 1940s. Second, by examining the way these practices related to Occupation’s educational democratization, it explores how their psychological approach to democracy defined—and arguably constrained—the dynamism of this broader project. Lastly, the work discusses who supported and opposed this new tekio discourse. American authorities succeeded in garnering the support of many elites in Japanese education (e.g., Ministry of Education officials, leading academics), but other educators remained skeptical.

This essay queries how ideas about school choice traversed the Pacific in the late twentieth century. Specifically, it reconstructs and deconstructs the visits of two African American proponents of parental school choice, Annette “Polly” Williams and Howard Fuller, from Milwaukee, Wisconsin, to Aotearoa New Zealand in the 1990s. Drawing from oral histories, newspapers, and archives in the United States and Aotearoa New Zealand, this essay explores Fuller’s and Williams’s travels and the responses they generated to better understand how and why choice-based educational policies, including school vouchers, gained traction, or failed to do so, at the close of the twentieth century. A close-up analysis of one small strand of the transnational voucher movement reveals that educational ideas and policies did not drift naturally from one place to another. To the contrary, they were cultivated; and that cultivation, particularly when done across vastly different contexts, represented both a political act and an expression of power. This essay also prompts historians to understand the global ascendancy of school choice at the end of the twentieth century by looking to other transnational frameworks and ideologies in addition to neoliberalism: decolonization, Indigenous activism, Pan-Africanism, and the “Black Pacific,” among others. Finally, this essay hopes to encourage more historians of education, including Americanists, to peer beyond national boundaries when investigating the cultivation, development, and dissemination of educational ideas and practices. A close analysis of the transpacific travels of Fuller and Williams can serve as a tangible model for how historians might utilize microhistory to reap the benefits of transnational inquiry while avoiding its analytical hazards: broad generalizations, oversimplifications, and cultural misinterpretations.

Spain’s greatest modern philosopher, José Ortega y Gasset (1883-1955), wrote about many aspects of education including its aims; the education of children, nations, and elites; types of pedagogy; the reform of the university; and the challenges facing educators in an era of “triumphant plebeianism.” The article examines all aspects of Ortega’s educational thought, with a particular focus on his ideas about elites and their education, drawing on writings unavailable in English, including texts not published during his lifetime. At the heart of his writing is a vision of the qualities needed to enable individuals to make what he called a “project” out of their lives along with a powerful advocacy of the non-utilitarian and Socratic pedagogies that would help achieve that vision. The article looks at the balance of radical and conservative elements within Ortega’s educational thought and its relation to earlier “progressive” thinkers, and concludes with an evaluation of his legacy.

I am a cinematic being of the Anthropocene. As a concerned citizen and environmental educator, I immerse myself in film. Gummo is a 1997 film by Harmony Korine that deeply resonates with me as a testament to the capacity and desire for humanity to realise the potential to rise from the epochal fall of the Anthropocene. I propose that my relationship with Gummo as arche-cinema is not just a process of watching and interpreting Korine’s cinematic world, but also (re)projecting my dreams of a new reality for the whole-Earth ecosystem onto the world-out-there. I suggest that my entanglement with Gummo exemplifies my climating and becoming-climate as film in our current human-induced climate crises, and in this way, I argue that I am learning to live-with climate change through film.

The need for more radical forms of learning-centred transformation is increasingly recognised in transformations to sustainability. Yet these approaches to learning remain under-developed and undertheorised especially from a politics and environmental education research perspective. This paper offers a review of an emerging politics of transgression in environmental education research, as developed through an extensive T-learning (transgressive learning in times of climate change) knowledge co-production research programme, spanning eight years, and continuing. The ongoing problem that the research programme seeks to address is how to do transgressive learning in/as environmental education research in times where the fall out of coloniality and fossil capital collide in an increasingly regressive political landscape which Akomolafe and Ladha (2017, pg. 820) describe as “the deadening ideology of late-stage capitalism and its corollaries of patriarchy, rationalism, white supremacy and anthropocentrism.” Through the paper, I seek to highlight a “low theory” (Wark, 2021) of transgressive politics in environmental education research, embodied in practices of transgressive politics as movement in co-engaged T-learning research, which I illuminate through a meta-reflective curational process from the ‘archive’ or T-learning knowledge commons collection.

Informal digital learning of English (IDLE) is a promising way of learning English that has received growing attention in recent years. It has positive effects on English as a foreign language (EFL) learners and also creates valuable opportunities for EFL teachers to improve their teaching skills. However, there has been a lack of a valid and reliable scale to measure IDLE among teachers in EFL contexts. To address this lacuna, this study aims to develop and validate a scale to measure IDLE for EFL teachers in Iran. For this purpose, a nine-step rigorous validation procedure was undertaken: administering pilot interviews; creating the first item pool; running expert judgment; running interviews and think-aloud protocol; running the pilot study; performing exploratory factor analysis, Cronbach’s alpha, and confirmatory factor analysis; creating the second item pool; conducting expert reviews; and performing translation and translation quality check. Findings yielded a 41-item scale with six subscales: IDLE-enhanced benefits (12 items), IDLE practice (five items), support from others (nine items), authentic L2 experience (three items), resources and cognition (four items), and frequency and device (eight items). The scale demonstrated satisfactory psychometric properties such that it can be used for research and educational purposes in future.

This study explores the integration of generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) in informal digital learning of English (IDLE) practices, focusing on its potential to enhance language learning outcomes and addressing the technological challenges language teachers face in utilising AI-based tools to facilitate second language acquisition. Based on the research context of IDLE and holistic learning ecology and drawing on the theoretical frameworks of technological pedagogical and content knowledge and social cognitive theory, we performed a mixed-methods investigation with an empirical experiment to assess the effectiveness of GenAI followed by semi-structured interviews. The results suggest that the GenAI-mediated IDLE practices effectively improve college students’ oral proficiency in English from both technological and humanistic perspectives. However, results also indicate that the GenAI conversational partner alone is not adequate to provoke continuous extramural GenAI-mediated IDLE practices. We discuss the theoretical and pragmatic significance of GenAI-mediated IDLE in educational equity and reformation.

Effective collaboration between key stakeholders increases the educational opportunities and outcomes of students with autism spectrum disorder (ASD). Although the value of collaboration between the central members of a student’s network has been widely cited, how collaboration occurs between different stakeholder groups in the education of Australian primary and secondary students with ASD is not widely known. The aim of this review was to identify the factors that influence collaborative practices between three primary stakeholder groups supporting the education of Australian students with ASD: family, school, and community. Through this lens, we analysed the intent of the collaborative practices as well as the specific details of the collaborative practices identified across the research literature published since the implementation of the Disability Standards for Education 2005 (Commonwealth of Australia, 2006). Results from this review indicate existing motivations and processes of collaboration, as well as directions for future research and practice.

Within Holocaust studies, there has been an increasingly uncritical acceptance that by engaging with social media, Holocaust memory has shifted from the ‘era of the witness’ to the ‘era of the user’ (Hogervorst 2020). This paper starts by problematising this proposition. This claim to a paradigmatic shift implies that (1) the user somehow replaces the witness as an authority of memory, which neglects the wealth of digital recordings of witnesses now circulating in digital spaces and (2) agency online is solely human-centric, a position that ignores the complex negotiations between corporations, individuals, and computational logics that shape our digital experiences. This article proposes instead that we take a posthumanist approach to understanding Holocaust memory on, and with, social media. Adapting Barad's (2007) work on entanglement to memory studies, we analyse two case studies on TikTok: the #WeRemember campaign and the docuseries How To: Never Forget to demonstrate: (1) the usefulness of reading Holocaust memory on social media through the lens of entanglement which offers a methodology that accounts for the complex network of human and non-human actants involved in the production of this phenomenon which are simultaneously being shaped by it. (2) That professional memory institutions and organisations are increasingly acknowledging the use of social media for the sake of Holocaust memory. Nevertheless, we observe that in practice the significance of technical actancy is still undervalued in this context.