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The book has generated a passionate dialogue-disagreement (mostly but not entirely) with the book. Dialogue-disagreement is based on challenges, disagreements and rebuttals between opponents, often belonging to different, even irreconcilable, paradigms. The goal of dialogue-disagreement is not so much to convince the opponent to change their mind but rather to critically examine and problematize the two involved paradigms: the authors’ and the reviewer’s. By taking the generated challenges and disagreements seriously, both irreconcilable paradigms can grow through their replies. Dialogue-disagreement gives the participants–opponents the gift of revealing their own paradigmatic blind spots, which are often invisible from within their paradigms. Dialogue-disagreement is exploratory and based on an agnostic relationship between frenemies, i.e. “friendly enemies.”

This is a critical book review essay of Self Managed Learning and the New Educational Paradigm (Cunningham, 2021).

The reviewer views Ian Cunningham’s Self Managed Learning educational paradigm as a hybrid of Progressive and Democratic Education, while the reviewer sees his/her Self-Education paradigm as entirely Democratic (and Dialogic). Elsewhere, the reviewer discussed and critically analyzed the Progressive Education paradigm, which generally involves channeling the student’s learning activism and subjectivity toward learning outcomes desired by an educator. It uses the educator’s manipulation of the student’s subjectivity to make them study what the educator wants them to study. In contrast, the paradigm of Democratic Education assumes that the educatee is the final authority of their own education. The educatee decides whether to study, when to study, what to study, how to study, with whom to study, where to study, for what purpose to study and so on. The educatee makes these decisions by themselves or with the help of other people at the educatee’s discretion and conditions. The reviewer charges that Ian’s Self Managed Learning paradigm is a hybrid of both paradigms, with the Progressive Education paradigm taking the lead and exploiting the Democratic Education paradigm.

The book presented a unique, innovative practice worth a critical analysis. The reviewer’s dialogue-disagreement with the book reveals a particular hybrid of Progressive and Democratic Education which is common to some innovative self-directed learning.

The purpose of this paper is to use entrepreneurship to bridge the traditional-progressive education rift.

The rift between traditional and progressive education is first deconstructed into five dualisms. Conceptual question-based analysis is then applied to determine if and how three entrepreneurial tools could contribute to bridging this rift; effectuation, customer development and appreciative inquiry. Finally, pattern-based generalizations are drawn from this analysis.

Patterns in the analysis motivate the articulation of an overarching educational philosophy – learning-through-creating-value-for-others – grounded in entrepreneurship and capable of bridging the educational rift.

Only three entrepreneurial tools are included in the conceptual analysis, signifying a need to explore whether other tools could also help teachers bridge the traditional-progressive education rift. Entrepreneurial tools and the new educational philosophy manifesting entrepreneurship could also need to be further contextualized in order to be useful in education.

The tentatively new educational philosophy has been shown to be capable of bridging five dualisms in education which are currently problematic for teachers in their daily practice, and to remedy teacher challenges such as complexity, lack of resources, assessment difficulties and student disengagement.

An educational philosophy grounded in entrepreneurship has arguably not been proposed previously. Contrasting existent educational philosophies, this new philosophy goes beyond learning-through to also emphasize creating-value-for-others. This could facilitate bridging between traditional and progressive education, one of the most important challenges in education. It could also be used to facilitate the infusion of entrepreneurship into general education.

The purpose of this paper is to explore philosophies of progressive education circulating in Australia in the period immediately following the expansion of secondary schools in the 1960s. It examines the rise of the alternative and community school movement of the 1970s, focusing on initiatives within the Victorian government school sector. It aims to better understand the realisation of progressive education in the design and spatial arrangements of schools, with specific reference to the re-making of school and community relations and new norms of the student-subject of alternative schooling.

It combines historical analysis of educational ideas and reforms, focusing largely on the ideas of practitioners and networks of educators, and is guided by an interest in the importance of school space and place in mediating educational change and aspirations. It draws on published writings and reports from teachers and commentators in the 1970s, publications from the Victorian Department of Education, media discussions, internal and published documentation on specific schools and oral history interviews with former teachers and principals who worked at alternative schools.

It shows the different realisation of radical aims in the set up of two schools, against a backdrop of wider innovations in state education, looking specifically at the imagined effects of re-arranging the physical and symbolic space of schooling.

Its value lies in offering the beginnings of a history of 1970s educational progressivism. It brings forward a focus on the spatial dimensions of radical schooling, and moves from characterisation of a mood of change to illuminate the complexities of these ideas in the contrasting ambitions and design of two signature community schools.

Given the current marginalization of social studies education in schools, this paper explores the social studies centered community-school model of Elsie Ripley Clapp, who was a significant educator, scholar, and leader within progressive education. A former graduate assistant of John Dewey, Clapp put progressive pedagogical ideology into practice in the 1920s and 1930s through her curriculum development and administrative leadership in rural schools such as: the Ballard School in Kentucky and the Arthurdale Schools in West Virginia. She developed a social studies focused, experiential curriculum rooted in her vision of schools as democratic spaces. First, biographical information about Clapp’s life, educational experiences, and commitment to social justice is provided. Second, Clapp’s community school model at the Ballard School is explored. The model, which united people across social class and centered on local history, geography, and economics, provides implications for how we might re-envision our current approaches to social studies education.

This paper explores the context within which experimental, pedagogically progressive schools were established in Australia during the first decades of the 20th century.

The paper presents a case study of the establishment of Rosbercon Girls’ Grammar School. It draws on educator accounts, archival documents and contemporary literature to provide a brief narrative of the events leading to the opening of the school; to sketch the family of educators who were pivotal in making it a reality; and to identify key aspects of the social and legislative context that made such an initiative possible.

Rosbercon was established at a time when a modest school could be established relatively easily by a small group of educators with a shared vision. The early 20th century was a moment of national optimism in Australia, where an appetite for new educational ideas created a climate in which innovative educators found fertile soil for their pedagogical experiments and adaptation of emerging ideas from around the world. Their efforts were facilitated by an emerging global network of personal interactions, professional learning, professional associations and educational literature.

This paper addresses the relative lack of scholarly examination of the origins of Rosbercon Girls’ Grammar School, an institution that previous authors have identified as Australia’s oldest experimental school. The case study also contributes to a broader appreciation of the trajectory of progressive education during the early 20th century.

Outdoor education was first included in the formal (written) curriculum for New Zealand schools in 1999. This article explores New Zealand outdoor education as a product of a particular coincidence of social and economic conditions and the contested domais of pedagogy and curriculum during the period 1935‐1965. Popkewitz, among others, views school curricula and associated practices as emerging from ‘systems of ideas that inscribe styles of reasoning, standards and conceptual distinctions’ which ‘shape and fashion interpretation and action’. It is these ‘systems of ideas’, or ‘traditions’ in Goodson and Marsh’s terms, that provide a framework for understanding outdoor education in New Zealand schools. Since the 1930s, outdoor education in New Zealand appears to have consolidated from, and been shaped by, competing educational ideologies and changing social and economic influences. The way in which outdoor education accommodated competing traditions is the focus of this, necessarily broad, analysis

The paper is a study of Clarice McNamara, née Irwin (1901–1990), an educator who advocated for reform in the interwar period in Australia. Clarice is known for her role within the New Education Fellowship in Australia, 1940s–1960s; however, the purpose of this paper is to investigate her activism in an earlier period, including contributions made to the journal Education from 1925 to 1938 to ask how she addressed conditions of schooling, curriculum reform, and a range of other educational, social, political and economic issues, and to what effect.

Primary source material includes the previously ignored contributions to Education and a substantial unpublished autobiography. Used in conjunction, the sources allow a biographical, rhetorical and contextual study to stress a dynamic relationship between writing, attitudes, and the formation and activity of organisations.

McNamara was an unconventional thinker whose writing urged the case for radical change. She kept visions of reformed education alive for educators and brought transnational progressive literature to the attention of Australian educators in an overall reactionary period. Her writing was part of a wider activism that embraced schooling, leftist ideologies, and feminist issues.

There has been little scholarly attention to the life and work of McNamara, particularly in the 1920s–1930s. The paper indicates her relevance for histories of progressive education in Australia and its transnational networks, the Teachers Federation and feminist activism between the wars.

This study seeks to trace the development of curriculum integration and related curricula designs in state schools in Aotearoa/New Zealand (NZ) during the “New Education” era (1920s‐1940s).

The mixed historical/theoretical analysis draws on primary and secondary data.

The paper concludes that largely forgotten designs for curriculum integration developed in the 1920s‐1940s in NZ are similar in intent to the student‐centred “integrative” model of curriculum integration and may usefully inform the contemporary discourse in NZ concerning best practice on middle schooling for young adolescents (approximately ten to 14 years old).

The study provides an additional point of entry towards theorising and re‐evaluating the history of progressive education in NZ.

This study provides historical/theoretical context for recent interest in curriculum integration in NZ, particularly in relation to middle schooling and to student‐centred pedagogies.