This thesis explores the connections between dialogue, education and democracy. It begins by asking: ‘what are the implications of dialogic theory for democratic education’? In doing so it draws on concepts from the work of Arendt, Biesta, Dewey and Wegerif: dialogic space as a productive metaphor for education; an ontology of difference in which meaning emerges through dialogue; and authentic democratic action as ‘coming into being’ in negotiation with others. It then asks, ‘Can we teach for democracy?’ by looking at recent practices of citizenship education in Britain. It argues that genuine democratic education must consider students as already being citizens rather than as citizens-in-training, and must offer them opportunities to express their values in action. A theory of ‘responsible leadership’, based on a ‘pedagogy of challenge’, is proposed as a means to enable students to develop the skills and dispositions needed for democratic participation. Short courses in leadership education for teenagers are identified as sites to test this theory. Two empirical studies are detailed, which use a longitudinal case-study approach primarily based on student interviews. The first was a two-day school-based course for academically able 13-18 year olds; the second was a five-day outdoor residential course for 16-18 year olds. Both studies found significant development in students’ skills and dispositions for learning, including: openness to others’ ideas, confidence, greater self-knowledge and better communication skills. In both cases, students’ personal dispositions and insights endured. However, lack of opportunities for democratic action after the courses meant that learned collaborative skills were not strongly embedded; this also meant that ‘responsible leadership’ was not often demonstrated subsequently. Nonetheless, the studies present strong evidence for the transformative power of a pedagogy of challenge, which demands further research.

This study aimed to answer the research question: “What role do stakeholders believe character education might play in strengthening UAE university students’ local knowledge?” Implementing character education was explored in terms of its potential influence on national identity and local knowledge in UAE education. The literature review covers several studies that inform a relevant research design. The literature review determines the best-fit term to use in this study by comparing and contrasting suitability of related pedagogical fields to character education, such as citizenship, civic, moral, and ethics education. Additionally, studies that serve as useful examples, such as the Crick Report, Lee’s Taiwan study, and regionally relevant articles such as Al Kharusi and Atweh, are discussed to inform the reader of the study’s design for the Dubai context. A mixed methods methodological design was used with a two-phased approach, a quantitative questionnaire survey and a qualitative series of interviews using an interview schedule. With a relativist, constructivist interpretive viewpoint, three groups were assessed with more than 300 participants: students and administrators at a Dubai case study university were assessed, as well as a group of external education leaders. Findings generally supported the idea of strengthening local knowledge learning both in and outside of educational institutions, with a focus on culture and language familiarity. Also, stakeholders strongly felt the need for choice in how and where learning takes place. Findings that inform the current status quo include that there is already a sentiment of citizenship within the UAE by expatriate residents. Many residents allude to the ‘third culture’ phenomenon, and thus feel belonging to several societies. Thus, results show that character education has potential to influence local knowledge and national identity within the UAE, and be directed at all students, both national and non-national.

Many countries across the globe are undergoing rapid economic and social change; and there are increasing efforts to reform, revamp and revitalise education – to equip students for the ever-changing future. Education is considered to be transformative; but the area of transformative learning has been mainly theorised in the field of adult education. Comparatively, teaching approaches designed to bring about such transformation or transformative teaching has been less explored or understood. Connecting various related literature, this study places deeper learning at the centre of transformation through learning. Aiming to fill a gap within the literature, this study explores transformation through learning in a comprehensive school setting at a K-5 School in the North East of the United States by asking the following questions, ‘What are the teachers’ and students’ lived experiences of transformation through music and arts infused creative learning as practiced at an Elementary School in Northeast of USA?’ and ‘What is the role of the arts and music in this process?’. Located within the interpretive paradigm, this ethnographic case study included 7 – 14-year-old students (Grade 2 – Grade 5) and staff, aimed at investigating the phenomenon of ‘transformation through learning’ through a range of sources within its natural environment. Various data collection methods were used, including semi-structured interviews, observations (field notes, video-recordings, still images), conceptual drawing and learning walks. These provided rich, in-depth data, permitting triangulation which strengthened the findings and allowed for an illuminating understanding of the topic. An iteratively developed framework representing elements or behaviours relating to transformation was utilised as a lens to identify relevant critical incidents during the data collection process. Employing thematic analysis on the data collected resulted in eight themes that represent the lived experiences of transformation through learning. These thematic findings highlight that relevance, mindsets and placing arts at centre of the school culture are key to providing transformative learning experiences. The study connects two arguments, that fostering deeper learning enables students to meet new expectations and demands of the changing future; and that it is vital to provide students with a well-rounded curriculum with rich arts education to prepare them for success in the future. Thus, the findings of this study develop the understanding of ‘transformation through learning’ and offer a model framework from the practice at this research site from which others could create their own.

This study investigates how the philosophy of Emmanuel Levinas might shape practice in music education. In a climate of accountability and performativity within wider educational policy-making, the drive for ever-increasing efficiency has overtaken notions of professional judgement and ethical practice. This study opens by introducing current strands of international meta-policy priorities in education, and explores moves to redress the emphasis on standardisation and accountability through the rediscovery of notions of responsibility in the work of Biesta drawing on Bauman (1993), who in turn finds a way forwards in Levinas’ ‘ethics as first philosophy’. Emmanuel Levinas is introduced as a major thinker of the twentieth century whose influence is increasing throughout social science disciplines and who, writing firstly as a teacher, provides valuable philosophical tools with which to investigate current practices in education. Over the past three decades competing paradigms for music education have tended to polarise rather than ground thinking in music education research. More recent notions of music-making as ethical encounter (Bowman, 2000) and as the practice of hospitality (Higgins, 2007) have taken forwards Small’s relationship-oriented conceptualisation of ‘musicking’ (1998), and these provide the starting point for this study’s search for an ethical underpinning for music education. Levinas’ first major work (1969) provides two key strands of thought – the polarities of totality and infinity, and the exhortation to ‘look into the face of the Other’. These tools open up explorations of how pupils encounter difference, the unfamiliar, and of how narrow conceptions of learning in the music classroom may be understood as an ethical problem. At the heart of this study is the report of ethnographically-informed fieldwork undertaken in a Scottish secondary school, following a group of 13-year-olds through an academic year of class music lessons. Participant observation and semi-structured interviews were methods employed alongside participant self-documentation in order to gather pupils’ experiences and perspectives on how they encounter the Other through their music-making at school and in their everyday lives. A critical realist theoretical framework enabled the experiences and perspectives of pupils to be set within a deep, layered conception of social reality, uncovering the dynamic interplay of structural forces and pupil agency. Through the lens of Levinas’ philosophy pupils’ ‘practices of facing’ were brought to light and conceptualised as agential. ii From these ‘practices of facing’ the study’s conclusions are drawn. Music-making is conceptualised through terms in which Levinas spoke of language, as having as its first impetus a reaching out to the Other, ‘putting a world in common’. This grounds, and is generative of, an epistemological diversity within which aesthetic and praxial approaches are anchored in one underlying, ethical orientation, where the attentiveness and openness of aesthetic sensitivity are as significant as the developing of skills and competencies in enabling an ever-deeper entering-into ‘infinity in the face of the Other’. This study offers a critique of the present educational environment which prioritises predetermined outcomes and narrow models of knowing, thereby, according to a Levinasian view, legitimising practices of violence and domination, and sets out an alternative orientation, where richly contextualised learning in the music classroom and a radical openness might allow for an infinity of possibility to break in.

This thesis enquires into the kinds of citizenship taught and learned in formal and informal settings of citizenship education in Scotland. There has been a ‘perceived’ crisis in democratic citizenry in the UK and elsewhere across the world since the 1990s and this has brought about renewed interests in citizenship education whereby young people are a specifically targeted group. Yet, citizenship education is a fundamentally contested domain where conflicting and contrasting ideologies co-exist and the Scottish version of ‘education for global citizenship’ is an archetypal example of this. By exploring similarities and differences between accounts of ‘what adult practitioners do’ and ‘what young people learn’ in each setting, the thesis emphasises tensions and challenges of citizenship education and their implications for the wider debates about the complex relationship between citizenship, democracy and education. The thesis deploys a synthesised theoretical framework for differentiating and analysing the types of education and learning that are legitimate points of reference in citizenship education for democratic life. It distinguishes between approaches to education for citizenship that focuses on membership of the community (relationships and service work in communities), formal political participation (political literacy in terms of institutions, processes and procedures) entrepreneurial citizenship (employability skills and economic participation) and social and political activism (the commitment and capacity to think critically and act collectively to realise the inherent goals of democracy). These different approaches entail a broad ideological mix of civic republicanism, liberalism and neoliberalism which informs citizenship education. The increasing emphasis on economic participation in educational contexts resonates with what can be termed as a neoliberal version of ‘responsiblised citizenship’ that promotes an individualised and depoliticised conception of citizenship by equipping young people with knowledge, skills and experiences to get on and get into the labour market through their own individual efforts rather than being concerned with the collective needs and interests of young people. Formal education and, to some extent informal community education, tend to overlook the de facto issues, experiences and contributions of young people as engaged citizens and the need to focus on the commitment and capacity to think critically and act collectively in order to realise the inherent goals of democracy as an unfinished project. Consequently, the experience of citizenship education is one young people often feel marginal to or marginalised from. This thesis challenges the dominant assumption of ‘disengaged youth’ to focus instead on the democratic deficit at the heart of citizenship teaching and learning. Along with the ‘invited’ spaces of citizenship education, in both formal and informal settings, the goal of democracy should include the ‘invented’ spaces of citizenship learning which reflects the lived experience, concerns and aspirations of young people.

This thesis presents a model of institutional values transmission through cross-case analysis of values education undertaken in three UK secondary schools. Since the early 1980s a significant amount of research has been carried out on cultural transmission and the transmission of values, though it has focused on intergenerational transmission within families and the interaction between the school and the family in terms of converging and diverging values and worldviews. Very little work has been done on the process of transmission of values in schools or other organisations that is evidence-based. An increasing number of governments and organisations, as well as schools, are beginning to invest seriously in values education programmes, but whether the idea of values education is theoretically coherent is still disputed. Through an evaluation of the philosophical, psychological and sociological literature on values and employing phenomenological and semiotic analyses, a theory of values as transmissible entities is developed, which is then extended to a general concept of values transmission using the twin terms invocation and evocation, to denote modes of bringing value concepts to the awareness of an audience and of generating group cohesion through a shared experience linked to particular values, respectively, these terms themselves emerging from the theory of values. Through data collection, analysis and modelling of values education in three schools – a state comprehensive, a faith school and an independent – a plausible mechanism for institutional values transmission is developed. This mechanism integrates two partial models: a permeation-authority inculcation model of transmission flow with a resistance-transformation model of moral autonomy. At its heart it envisages a systemically robust cycle of institutional values discourse, institutional cultural expectations and the generation of a sense of community shored up by individual commitment. A two tier qualitative approach is used in this research, having both an inductive, theory generating phase of field research, data capture and analysis, and a deductive, hypothesis-led confirmatory phase. The inductive phase uses a case study format and cross-case analysis, providing data for analysis and for testing a set of hypotheses in the deductive phase. The development of a mechanism for institutional values transmission is carried out using an institutional model of the schools as a data collection and analytical instrument, based on three structural aspects: an authority hierarchy; an interiority/exteriority duality in the institutional lived-experience; and a system hierarchy. Multiple data collection and analytic methods are employed in each case study, in order to build up a ‘three-dimensional’ picture of the transmission of values in each school. Both comparative and iterative cross-case analyses are carried out. The findings emerging from the case studies suggest the following tentative conclusions: schools have varying degrees of awareness of the values that they impart, although all consider values education to be an important part of what they do and to impact on student performance and behaviour; while there is some explicit values-oriented pedagogy, most teaching of values is implicit; schools with greater ethnic diversity have more challenges to build a cohesive community, as this is at odds with the ‘spontaneous sociality’ of the pupils; there is a broad convergence on the same values found most widely distributed throughout schools across the widest range possible with respect to forms of governance, educational philosophy and demography. The findings carry a number of pedagogical implications: general support is found for explicit values education programmes and the linking between behavioural standards and academic achievement; the importance of the development of a ‘moral community’ around the ethos of the school and the creation of opportunities for multiple belonging is highlighted; and resistance to institutional authority structures is explored for its significant potential for transformation to an acceptance of institutional values.

This thesis comprises a critical review and suggestions for enhancement of the Community of Inquiry Framework (CoIF), the frequently cited model of collaborative community-based online learning. It combines a systematic engagement of relevant literature and research, with the application of the CoIF thinking to six of my peer-reviewed publications. Although not initially conceived as forming part of a doctorate submission, these publications are drawn upon throughout this narrative, to assist my interrogation of the CoIF. They are also used to provide evidence of my continuing journey as an education researcher. This thesis is therefore not an exegesis – a traditional meta-narrative encompassing this candidate’s publications. It moves beyond my findings in the publications to create and present supplementary concepts, and develop pointed guidance about using the Framework in supporting online learning in tertiary education. My review first critically interrogates the three constituent elements or Presences of the CoIF. Social presence emerges as a highly complex and multi-faceted construct, in which the de-emphasising of the affective in the CoIF seems at variance with current research reporting the strong student emotional response to working online, and particularly in collaborative, community-based groupings. Then, in Cognitive presence, there has been little consideration of, and specificity about, reflection in the CoIF. My critique proposes that reflection and critical thinking are distinct but inter-related concepts; both of which need to be addressed. Teaching presence is renamed ‘Tutoring presence’ informed by my review based upon my emergent understandings of student-centred learning. Two enhancements to the CoIF are then proposed, together with the rationale for establishment of a Tutors’ Network. The first enhancement, referred to as 'the Influences,’ unites and enriches the individual Presences. The second argues for the existence and use of a personal learning retreat at the heart of a community of inquiry, addressing a perceived omission in the CoIF. This learner ‘space’ provides a ‘quiet, safe place’ for the private (internal) world of the learner, as a foil to the shared collaborative space in the CoIF (the external world). Finally, a Tutors’ Network is outlined as a vehicle for advancing their understandings and knowledge of online, collaborative, community-based learning in general, and in particular of communities of inquiry. This should develop the abilities of online tutors, improve their learners’ educational experiences and encourage research and scholarship into the CoIF.

This thesis considers a theoretical tradition which is concerned with how adult literacies education might not always serve to socialise students into existing society, instead encouraging possibilities for desirable alternatives to it. Without this possibility, adult literacies education might only be understood as a socialising machine that slots students into society as it stands and where the role of research is to describe its operation. My research describes a long-standing refusal by educators, researchers and students to accept this possibility and my thesis continues this tradition. Through the analysis and interplay of the work of Pierre Bourdieu, James Paul Gee, Paulo Freire, Jacques Rancière, I distinguish between empowerment and emancipation in the context of literacies education. I set out the assumptions that Bourdieu and Gee make, how they understand power, identity, discourse and oppression, and what this means for the practice of an empowering adult literacies education. I also present assumptions made by Freire and Rancière, how they understand equality and oppression, and how an emancipatory literacies education might be understood and practiced. In particular, I describe how education for ‘empowerment’ encourages practices underpinned by the assumption that ideological processes prevent students from understanding how oppression is manifested. In contrast, I describe how an emancipatory education implies enacting educational relationships that are not reliant on this assumption, whilst exerting a social response to societal oppression. I make three claims. Firstly, that the idea of an emancipatory literacies education has come to be neglected or conflated with the idea that literacies education might empower, which has come to hold great sway. In so doing, I critique Freire’s work whilst reclaiming it as an emancipatory project. Secondly, that the educational practices associated with adult literacies for empowerment can be understood to encourage the socialisation of students into society as it stands. This emphasises the importance of distinguishing between empowerment and emancipation in the context of adult literacies education. Finally, that emancipation is a notion that must continue to be questioned and explored if educators, students and academics are to take responsibility for the practice of adult literacies education and its consequences. An emancipatory literacies education cannot be reliant upon the assumption that discourse is inherently ideological. Instead, it is predicated upon teachers and students assuming that emancipation is possible and acting on that assumption.

Η συγκεκριμένη μελέτη, διερευνά εκτενώς τις αξίες στα Νεοελληνικά αναγνώσματα εξαταξίου Γυμνασίου περιόδου 1940-1950, το θεματικό και ιδεολογικό περιεχόμενο τους, σε μια ιδιαίτερη ιστορικό-πολιτική φάση της πολεμικής και μεταπολεμικής Ελλάδας. Η έρευνα έδειξε ότι ανάλογα με τις πολιτικές και θρησκευτικές συνθήκες στα Νεοελληνικά αναγνώσματα έμπαιναν κείμενα που αποσκοπούσαν στην προαγωγή των σκοπών που επεδίωκε η πολιτική κατάσταση. Η εσωτερίκευση αξιών ήταν επιλεκτική για να υπηρετηθούν οι εκάστοτε σκοποί της εξουσίας. Αξίες που βοηθούν στη πολιτικοποίηση όχι στη κομματικοποίηση δεν προωθούνται σε αυτά τα κείμενα. Παρατηρούμε ότι το σύστημα αξιών της περιόδου αυτής είναι μια σύνθεση εθνικών, θρησκευτικών και ηθικών αξιών. Ο κεντρικός θεματικός πυρήνας των κειμένων παραμένει σχετικά σταθερός, με βασικό άξονα προσανατολισμού την πατρίδα, τους Ελληνικούς τόπους, τη φύση, τη θρησκεία και την οικογένεια. Το αξιολογικό περιεχόμενο στα αναγνωστικά της περιόδου αυτής επικεντρώνεται στην προβολή κυρίως εθνικών, θρησκευτικών και ηθικών αξιών. Εμφανίζει περισσότερο έναν εθνοκεντρικό, παραδοσιακό και συντηρητικό προσανατολισμό αξιών, που ανταποκρίνεται στη συντηρητική υφή της κυρίαρχης ιδεολογίας της εποχής εκείνης, και μεταβάλλεται σε μια συστηματική προσπάθεια κατήχησης και δογματικού διαποτισμού. Όλες οι αξίες συνεργάζονται και αλληλοσυμπληρώνονται, και τελικά αποτελούν ένα ενιαίο ιδεολογικό σύστημα αξιών, συμβατό με την ιδεολογία του εκπαιδευτικού συστήματος, που ηγεμονεύεται από την κυρίαρχη ιδεολογία του πολιτικοκοινωνικού συστήματος. / This study explores at length the values in Modern Greek Literature readings six-grade secondary Gymnasium period 1940-1950, the thematic and ideological content in a particular historical-political phase of the war and the post-war Greece. The investigations showed that depending on the political and religious conditions the texts had aimed at promoting the objectives pursued by the political situation. Thus was selective internalization of values to serve the respective objects of power. Values that help politicization rather than political parties are not promoted in these texts. Notice that the value system of this period is a synthesis of national, religious - moral values. Central core theme of the text remains relatively stable, with the main orientation axis of the homeland, the Greek places, nature, religion and family. The evaluative content to readers of this period show mainly focuses on national religious and moral values. It displays a more ethnocentric, traditional and conservative orientation of values, which correspond to conservative texture of the dominant ideology of the time, and changes in a systematic effort indoctrination and dogmatic indoctrination. Altogether the values complement each other, and ultimately form a single ideological value system, compatible with the ideology of the educational system, which overmaster by the dominant ideology of social and political system.