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The aim of this paper is to contribute to making higher education, particularly online education, more relevant and inspiring by orienting it toward the pragmatics and aesthetics of knowing. This paper also demonstrates the relevance of cybernetics and cybernetic thinking in education today.

The author's general strategy is to connect processes of knowing to the purpose of education, thus providing an organizing principle for the design and practice of online education. Nontrivial conversation and aesthetic experience are combined in a cybernetic complementarity, conceptualized as the processes that foster understanding. This serves the purpose of education, defined here as developing an understanding of how knowledge is constructed and fostering ways of knowing that are creative and complex.

Because the world has become increasingly complex, ambiguous, and pluralistic, the type of thinking needed to act and interact in the world must also be complex, e.g. creative, adaptive, relational, and empathetic. Research shows that this type of thinking is brought forth by aesthetic experience and nontrivial conversation. Combining these as processes of knowing provides a non-dogmatic way of orienting education toward student-centered constructivist learning.

Connecting nontrivial conversation and aesthetic experience as processes of knowing is an original contribution to education literature. This is also an exemplar of generating a cybernetic complementarity for conceptual modelling in education design. Anyone interested in how online education can extend efforts to transform higher education so it may better facilitate thinking in ways that are creative and complex will find this paper valuable.

The purpose of this paper is to provide information regarding the ways in which the authors’ College’s faculty use paper within their pedagogical practice. A related purpose was to ascertain faculty interest in professional development initiatives related to reducing paper usage through technological affordances.

A survey was developed and administered to the faculty within the university’s Teachers College. The survey was built to assess faculty pedagogical use of paper. Both quantitative and qualitative data were collected via the survey.

The results suggested that digital resources are widely used by faculty, and students are encouraged to conserve paper. However, many faculty are uncomfortable with the complete elimination of paper.

Modeling and promoting environmentally sustainable pedagogical practice is imperative within institutions charged with preparing the next generation of educators.

Monika Fabijanska's groundbreaking exhibition The Un-Heroic Act showcased 20 representative artworks to survey the iconographic variety of representations of rape in contemporary women's art in the United States since the 1960s. Organized by the Andrew and Anya Shiva Gallery at John Jay College, City University of New York in 2018, the exhibition's wide range of pieces was brought together in dialogue for the first time to confront prevailing sexual violence misconceptions, rape myths, and to fill the void in women's art history.

In this chapter, Fabijanska is interviewed to glean insight into the curatorial strategies she deploys as challenges and sensitivities surrounding rape play out in the context of an art exhibition and catalog. Although The Un-Heroic Act has attracted substantial media coverage and scholarly attention, the role of curatorial intention and considerations in mediating difficult content to viewers in an educational setting, and shaping understanding of a complex issue, has not yet been explored in depth. Through this interview, these pertinent questions are unpacked.

Addressing some of the curatorial challenges she faced, Fabijanska brings to light the value that exhibition texts, audience engagement programs, contextualizing comments, and teaching hold. She shares her careful selection process, highlighting the necessity of taking a collaborative approach and working toward crafting “safe spaces” within which difficult questions can be broached.

This chapter focuses on an early British female writer's course offered at Ripon College, a small liberal arts institution in Ripon, Wisconsin, USA. The course was first offered during the spring of 2017 as Donald J. Trump began his term as president of the United States. The students and instructor aimed to make their classroom a place for honest and open discussions about the difficult socio-political environment as they continually sought connections between their own social concerns and those of the early women writers they studied. The essay focuses specifically on the group's study of eighteenth-century British author Eliza Haywood, her novella Fantomina, and her periodical The Female Spectator. Through their study of these texts, the group came to understand how their own stories mattered. They saw that their creativity was a tool with which they could navigate and resist political change. This realization manifested itself in the creative capstone project for the course – a student-author periodical based on The Female Spectator. The essay explains the instructor's pedagogical approach toward this project and features samples of the students' writing from both the periodical and their end-of-term reflective writings.

The purpose of this study is to explore the leadership experiences of four female secondary principals (two Black, two White) in one south‐western state to create significant discourse for understanding school leadership nested in complex social, political and cultural contexts. These women confronted education challenges of social justice, democracy, and equity in their schools.

The philosophical tradition of phenomenology was chosen as the qualitative methodology for this study “which is understood to be a concern for human meaning and ultimately for interpreting those meanings so that they inform our practice and our science”. As a secondary analysis of a specific finding (i.e. female leaders who exemplified a values‐orientation around issues of social justice in their leadership practices) from the original study the lived experiences of four female secondary school leaders were further explored.

All four women engaged in leadership praxis by: transforming school practices to promote equity and access for all students and embracing diversity of their student populations; connecting the world of research and practice; adopting democratic and participative leadership styles that relate to female values developed through socialization processes including building relationships, consensus building, power as influence, and working together for a common purpose.

While the focus is secondary school female leaders and educational leadership in a North American context, the implications have a broader transnational focus, exploring themes and issues that may span national boundaries and cultures.

For purposes of this article, the original data were revisited to conduct secondary analyses of the experiences of four women. Research contends that this approach can be used to generate new knowledge, new hypotheses, or support for existing theories; and that it allows wider use of data from rare or inaccessible respondents.