This article continues the efforts of Gert Biesta and Jim Hordern to address the nature and organisation of educational studies as highlighted in a recent special issue titled ‘Educational studies today and for the future: threats, hopes, and collaborations’ in BJES (Volume 7, No. 5, 2023). The aim is to articulate a distinctive voice or language within the study of education, addressing contemporary challenges in the field. Invoking German Pädagogik and American educationalist Schwab’s theory of the Practical, this article makes (...) a case for pedagogy as a distinctive discipline of education that has its own ways of thinking and theorising, centred on questions as to the purpose of education and the nature of educational practice. Furthermore, it asserts that pedagogy is a ‘practical’ discipline centred on understanding and developing educational practice. Conceived in this way, pedagogy can serve as a core and unifying component in educational studies, integrating the foundation disciplines and other subjects into the study of practice. It also functions as the ‘crowning’ discipline that organises foundation disciplines and related sources toward the professional education of teachers. (shrink)

Maintaining education as a pedagogical space for human formation, this book is distinctive in looking at the crisis rather than the success of Chinese education. The editors and contributors, mostly overseas and mainland Chinese scholars, argue that modern Chinese education has been built upon a superficial and instrumental embrace of Western modernity and a fragmented appropriation of Chinese cultural heritage. They call for a rethinking and re-envisioning of Chinese education, grounded in and enriched by various cultural traditions and cross-cultural dialogues. (...) Drawing on Chinese history and culture, Western and Chinese philosophies, curriculum and pedagogical theories, the collected volume analyzes why education as person-making has failed to take root in contemporary China, how the purpose of education has changed during the process of China’s modernization, and what a rediscovery of the meaning of person-making implies for rethinking and re-envisioning Chinese education in the current age of globalization and social change. _Re-envisioning Chinese Education: The meaning of person-making in a new age _discusses among other issues: China’s Historical Encounter with the West and Modern Chinese Education Rediscover Lasting Values: Confucian Cultural Learning Models in the Twenty-first Century Rethinking and Re-envisioning Chinese Didactics: Implications from the German Didaktik Tradition The New Basic Education and the Development of Human Subjectivity: A Chinese Experience This book will be relevant for scholars, researchers, and policy makers everywhere who seek a more balanced, more sophisticated, and philosophically better grounded understanding of Chinese education. (shrink)