This chapter reconceptualises environmental competence as a dynamic capability rooted in an interconnected blend of knowledge, skills, attitudes, values, understanding and desire. Drawing on foundational models, it examines the structural components of pro-environmental behaviour and links these to empirical studies emphasising the foundations of ecological action. Building on this, the chapter introduces dynamic frameworks – particularly the sustainability competency models developed by Wiek, Withycombe and Redman and extended by Redman and Wiek – which emphasise collaborative, anticipatory, normative and strategic dimensions of sustainability planning. Through reflective tasks and case-based learning, readers are encouraged to recognise and cultivate transformative competencies, such as intercultural mediation and intra-personal awareness, essential for navigating global environmental challenges. The chapter also highlights concepts like Kickwa alli kawsay and Japanese kizuna as culturally embedded pathways towards sustainable living, reinforcing the argument that environmental competence must be pluralistic, inclusive and action-oriented. Ultimately, the text advocates for a holistic shift from static notions of competence to adaptive, integrative models that empower individuals and communities to enact meaningful change within diverse societal contexts.

This chapter explores coordination, control, and information systems as the backbone of organizational infrastructure. Coordination systems link organizational elements, while control systems ensure quality and efficiency. Two key dimensions – formalization and centralization – shape how work is governed. Models include family (informal, centralized), machine (formal, centralized), market (informal, decentralized), clan (formal, decentralized), and mosaic (heterogeneous systems). Information systems support these models and vary by information volume and tacit knowledge: event-driven (low info, low tacit), data-driven (high info, low tacit), agent-driven (low info, high tacit), and relationship-driven (high info, high tacit). Aligning these systems with strategy, structure, and goals is essential. Misfits can hinder performance, while thoughtful design enhances adaptability and efficiency.

Chapter 11 AN EPISTEMIC THEORY OF STRATEGIC CONTROL argues that a knowledge-based theory of strategic control for expert skilled action can explain skilled action’s flexibility as well as the fact that skilled action is procedurally controlled. My discussion provides novel reasons to doubt the doctrine of essentially intentional actions. I outline a theory of automatic control.

According to Charles Taylor, the modern notion of the self is closely related to the notion of inwardness, for the self is taken to be something inside of us, accessible through introspection. Some medieval authors paved the way for this conception by identifying the self with the immaterial soul that somehow resides in the body. However, other authors clearly rejected an interiorization of the self, as this chapter argues. They took it to be a set of powers that is essentially related to external things and that becomes manifest in this relation. The chapter presents two case studies to spell out this alternative conception. It first analyzes Thomas Aquinas’s thesis that the self is present in bodily activities: whenever we perceive material objects, we become aware of ourselves as being directed toward them. The chapter then examines Peter of John Olivi’s thesis that the self is present in emotions: whenever we experience them, we cognize ourselves as being related to other people. It is therefore a bodily, relational, and social self that is at the core of two medieval theories.

This chapter makes the case for the importance of philosophy as a discipline in its own right, as a subject area vital to the better understanding of education and as a set of self-reflective practices that can make us better teachers. Philosophy is concerned largely with those areas of study and speculation beyond the reach of empirical analysis, addressing problems about how we construct knowledge, how we produce a just society and how we determine ‘right’ from ‘wrong’. Its central research methodology is simply to think with clarity. The significance of this discipline has not been limited to answering abstract questions about the human condition; philosophy has been instrumental in both making us into rational and reflective citizens and framing the ideas behind our entire system of mass schooling.

This chapter argues that the issue of ‘truth’ has played a foundational role, not only within the discipline of philosophy but also within many different aspects of Australian culture. However, there seems to be little agreement on what it really is, and while some philosophers contend that truth is a meaningless concept – a linguistic mirage – most would argue there’s something of importance there, but what is it? Even if we struggle to determine the real nature of truth – as we did with the real nature of right and wrong in Chapter 14 – at least we structure our culture, our knowledges and our school curricula around stuff we know to be unequivocally true … or do we? Arguably, many of the assumptions we make, often derived from five centuries of European colonialism, do not stand up to close scrutiny. They are often ‘truths’ that suit particular interests of the powerful, and subtly act to reinforce their worldview.

Chapter 2 presents the theoretical approach of the book. Images are conceptualized as cultural artefacts that are both signs open for meaning making and tools open for social action. They are also dialogical and political artefacts that take part in knowledge production and circulation.

This chapter shows how Laura Riding’s poetry was responding to a now-unrecognisable scientific regime of reading that prioritised exactitude over ambiguity. For her, this regime was brought about by the emergence of a new kind of literary critic, one she scathingly referred to as a bureaucratic ‘expert’. In response, her verse aimed to develop a superior form of exactitude, which she hoped would provide a poetics of literal truth. However, this chapter suggests that if Riding’s poetry does evince a truth-content, then it is not in its supposed exactitude but rather in how its artifice demonstrates a thinking precisely in excess of the forms of rational knowing that sought to determine it. In Riding’s own poetry – and this despite her best intentions – it is precisely what she would call its graphic and sonorous ‘freakishness’ that displayed the truth-content of that which scientific modernity consigned to the unknowable. This chapter thus reads Riding as an unchosen path for the history of poetics, one devoted to thinking about poetry’s singular truth-content in an era devoted to scientific specialisation and professionalisation.

Chapter 5 begins a closer examination of the text included with the ‘lost’ and ‘runaway’ notices. Description, and more particularly object description, was an emerging textual praxis in the eighteenth century. It relied on writers understanding the relevant features of particular ‘things’ to make them visible within a particular culture. In analysing the ‘lost’ and ‘runaway’ notices, it becomes clear that readers and writers were aware of the salient features needed to describe different things, such as watches and dogs. What becomes apparent within this chapter is that different languages of possession existed for different possessions. The second half of the chapter then explores the forms of knowledge and memory required to write descriptions of absent ‘things’. It finds different methods of recording at play, such as noting down salient details in diaries and memorandum books. It also finds that individuals often did not rely on their own memory but rather called upon the records and knowledge of others, such as watchmakers. Here we see evidence of material literacy and knowledge, but also of how it was shared and enacted by a wider community.

Drawing from critical realism and building on previous academic studies and writing theories and practices, the author advances approaches to academic writing that are both human and humane, by situating academic writing within the broader critical realist project of furthering human flourishing and emancipation; of what it means to be human; and of why things matter to people. Addressing what counts as human(e) in academic writing has become pressing, as concerns about machine-generated texts, such as Large Language Models like ChatGPT challenge understandings of truth, knowledge, and justice. Underlying the argument in this chapter is the assumption that writing in the academy is a social practice (specifically, a method of enquiry) that should be oriented towards epistemic virtues including commitment to truth and socially just standards of excellence. For academic writing to fulfil such commitments, the author argues that it needs to be human(e). For it to be human(e), it requires a writer–agent–knower to rationally judge between educative and harmful academic writing theories and practices, in the interests of human flourishing and emancipation.

Karl Schafer develops an account of reason in its theoretical use and argues that a proper appreciation of the end of reason puts one in a position to see that, while Kant rejects the rationalist claim that we can know or cognize the unconditioned, he nonetheless accepts that we are rationally committed to a form of doctrinal belief in the bare existence of something unconditioned. Kant thus takes reason’s interest in systematic comprehension to commit us, even from the perspective of theoretical reason (albeit only on “subjectively sufficient” grounds), to a version of the Principle of Sufficient Reason – specifically, the proposition that every finite, conditioned thing is ultimately grounded in something unconditioned.