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The purpose of this paper is to re-examine the life and work of a forgotten progressive educator – (Henry) Caldwell Cook who was an English and drama teacher at the Perse School in Cambridge, UK. By looking at his key work The Play Way (1917) as well as the small number of his other writings it further seeks to explain the distinctiveness of his thinking in comparison to his contemporaries with a particular focus upon educational democracy.

The work was constructed primarily through a reading of Cook’s published output but also archival study, specifically by examining the archives held within the Perse School itself. These consisted of rare copies of Cook’s written works – unused by previous scholars – and materials relating to Cook’s work in the school such as his theatre designs and a full collection of contemporary newspaper reviews.

The paper contends that Cook’s understanding of democracy and democratic education was different to that of other early twentieth century progressives such as Edmond Holmes and Harriet Finlay-Johnson. By so doing it links him to the ideas of progressivism emergent in America from John Dewey et al. who were more concerned with democratic ways of thinking. It therefore not only serves to resurrect Cook as a figure of importance but also offers new insights into early twentieth century progressivism.

The value of the paper is that it expands what little previous writing there has been on Cook as well as using unused materials. It also seeks to use a biographical approach to start to better delineate progressive educators of the past thereby moving away from seeing them as a homogenous grouping.

The year 2016 marked the 100th anniversary of Democracy and Education, one of John Dewey’s most widely translated and published books around the world still in the author’s lifetime. Nowadays, in a context in which pedagogy is bogged down in ‘economicism’ and suspicion towards any proposal that hints of value, Dewey’s ideas once again provide a ray of hope for a possible future. One of the contemporary authors that has fostered this hopeful reading of Dewey is Martha C. Nussbaum, whose appeal to bringing the humanities back to schools motivated a project on approaching the classic texts with the Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs), which we have developed during the past years with secondary education students from three schools in Santiago de Chile, Madrid and London. The project is based on an open reading of Sophocles’s Antigone through an online application that enables students from the participating schools to interact. This chapter delves deeper into the theoretical bases of the project. In the first two sections, we analyse the interpretation that Nussbaum and Dewey each made of Antigone. Then, in the third, we present the Antigone project as a learning experience promoting a creative democracy, as Dewey called it.

This paper describes Follett’s contribution to management theory in relationship to the political events and intellectual currents of her time and her unique inter‐relating of philosophy, political theory and management theory.

One common feature of different variants of participatory and action research is rejection of technocratic, undemocratic elements in science and inquiry, aiming to break the dominance of traditional academic views of science. These variants open up broader participation of people, and emancipate knowledge creation for the production of actionable knowledge with transformative potentials. The purpose of this chapter is to recognize and clarify a striving for knowledge democracy in these explicit or implicit democratizing ambitions and tendencies in the sense of broadening the participation of concerned parties in research and development work on open and equal terms. This recent concept, still in the process of formulation, has been proposed as a global mobilizing and unifying thinking for distributed networks and movements for participatory oriented research. The concept and movement had an initial embedding in the First Global Assembly for Knowledge Democracy in June 2017, Cartagena, Columbia. The purpose of the chapter is to elaborate on the meaning of knowledge democracy as a vision for the participatory and action research community. Particularly I will distinguish between different orientation to knowledge democracy, and the character of the logic of a more, open, democratic and coproductive science that can be a carrier of it.

Dewey, through his contributions to pragmatism (America’s sole original philosophy), has long been considered relative to symbolic interactionism (SI), which emerged from that philosophy. His impact on SI, while falling short of those of Mead and Cooley, has mainly come from (and has been limited to) concepts and insights developed in Human Nature and Conduct: An Introduction to Social Psychology (1922/1957) and his earlier, seminal, article, “The Reflex Arc Concept in Psychology,” published in 1896 during his tenure at the University of Chicago (1894–1904). SI, however, has wrongly ignored Dewey’s political theory, especially his concept of domination. In order to rectify this inattention, I summarize the social and historical contexts that motivated Dewey’s turn toward domination; outline the radical nature of his political theory; illustrate similarities of his political theory with Marx’s; expatiate on his concept of domination, including his argument for social practices to reduce surplus domination; and explicate the theoretical and political implications of taking his political theory seriously.

Focusing on The Agency, a project of Contact Theatre in North Manchester, the chapter uses records of a conversation between the two authors as well as detailed fieldnotes as the starting point for reflection on the nature of ‘youth participation’ which The Agency nurtures and supports. It shows how entrepreneurship can be and is being seized by young people who see the possibility of making a difference both for themselves as individuals and for their own communities. Young people are identified as protagonists of their own practice, becoming involved, with the support of facilitators, in both self-development and community development and, thus, we argue in new forms of cultural democracy in which relational practice that challenges the shaming of marginalised communities is at the fore. Historic and contemporary forms of working-class culture offer a powerful lens through which new anti-racist forms of community and cultural democracy emerge. For this to happen, recognition and resourcing are each essential.

Many educators fear that proliferating digital technologies in school and at home create an artificial barrier to young people from having a meaningful direct experience with the world. At the same time, others argue that ubiquitous access to these same technologies is essential if young people are to make sense of the increasingly complex information space characteristic of the twenty-first century. In an attempt to bridge this gap, the chapter draws on Dewey’s frame of experience as articulated in Democracy and Education and Experience and Education to craft a framework by which uses of digital technology can be assessed for their educational value. Characteristic features of experience-rich, growth-promoting uses of technology include support for both the active and passive dimensions of experience, as well as the ability to support continuity, interaction, purpose and progressive organization of experience. These (arguably) better uses of technology are in turn linked to broader concerns for young people developing the capacities needed for citizenship in a creative democracy. Numerous examples of youth projects facilitated by the author are provided to illustrate how the framework is applied in practice.

Why would rural sociologists in particular have an interest in democracy? To begin with, rural sociologists have had a long standing concern with issues of community. During the 1970s and 1980s, the concept of community within rural sociology came under criticism as a simple-minded repetition of hoary stereotypes about fellow-feeling and neighborliness in small towns and villages, in contrast to the anomie of the city. But the disciplinary interest in how and when people get along and mobilize for the collective good (if we may reduce the concern for community to that base) remained. The study of rural democracy seemed a more sophisticated way of studying these issues without resorting to the old gemeinschaft-gesellschaft distinction. Several of the contributions to this book thus retain a focus on small associations of people, as the classic gemeinschaft literature did, but now with the analytic tools of the rural sociology of democracy.

This chapter introduces the book through discussing the context in which it came about, namely a conference to mark the centenary of the publication of Dewey’s Democracy and Education. The first section relates to the book’s subtitle by describing and analysing the context in which speakers at the conference engaged in a ‘fightback’ against educational policies found to be narrowly based on economic aims, and to have lost sight of the humanistic aims of education, aims which Dewey analysed and championed. The book is structured around three key areas, all related to Dewey’s philosophy of education – the first concerns technology, the second, embodiment and the third, democracy and development. A discussion on the significance of each of these areas for contemporary educational theory is followed by detail on the individual chapters within them. This chapter concludes with an introduction to the cautiously optimistic and forward-looking epilogue by Gert Biesta on the matters and issues raised in the book.