Education's Epistemology extends and defends Siegel's "reasons conception" of critical thinking, developing it in both philosophical and educational directions. Of particular note is its emphasis on epistemic quality and epistemic rationality and its concerted defense of "universal" educational and philosophical ideals in the face of multicultural, postmodern, and other challenges.

Epistemologies of Ignorance provide educators a distinct epistemological view on questions of marginalization, oppression, relations of power and dominance, difference, philosophy, and even death among our youth. The authors of this edited collection challenge the ambivalence – ignorance – found in the construction of curriculum, teaching practices, research guidelines, and policy mandates in our schools. Further, ignorance is also considered a necessary by- product of knowledge production. In this sense, the authors explore not only issues of complicity but also issues of oppression in spite of educators’ liberatory intentions. While this is the first systematic effort to transfer epistemologies of ignorance to the educational scene, this movement has its roots in race, class, gender, and sexuality studies, particularly the work of Charles Mills, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Shannon Sullivan, and Nancy Tuana. It is our unequivocal belief that, while this is transformative and powerful scholarship, the study of ignorance remains understudied and under-theorized in education scholarship, from curriculum studies and cultural foundations to science education and educational psychology. This collection highlights without apology why this dangerous state of affairs cannot continue.

This edited volume examines the role of personal epistemology in teaching across early childhood, primary, secondary and tertiary contexts, and the implications for teacher education, incorporating the most up-to-date research and theorising in the field.

How is epistemology related to the issue of teaching science and evolution in the schools? Addressing a flashpoint issue in our schools today, this book explores core epistemological differences between proponents of intelligent design and evolutionary scientists, as well as the critical role of epistemological beliefs in learning science. Preeminent scholars in these areas report empirical research and/or make a theoretical contribution, with a particular emphasis on the controversy over whether intelligent design deserves to be considered a science alongside Darwinian evolution. This pioneering book coordinates and provides a complete picture of the intersections in the study of evolution, epistemology, and science education, in order to allow a deeper understanding of the intelligent design vs. evolution controversy. This is a very timely book for teachers and policy makers who are wrestling with issues of how to teach biology and evolution within a cultural context in which intelligent design has been and is likely to remain a challenge for the foreseeable future.

This book presents theoretical and empirical work pertaining to personal epistemology in the classroom and consider its broader educational implications.

Hugh Petrie, the author of the chapters in this anthology, spent his entire professional life as a philosopher, philosopher of education, and educational administrator fascinated by the questions of how we learn and how we know what we learn. The chapters in this anthology are selected from the articles and book chapters he published during his career. They include critiques of behaviorism and its supposed relevance to educational practice, analyses of the issues involved with interdisciplinary education, the nature of conceptual change, the role of metaphor as an essential component in learning anything radically new, a thorough-going examination of current educational testing dogma, and several discussions of the importance of ways of knowing for various educational policy issues. The works are informed throughout by the insights of evolutionary epistemology and Perceptual Control Theory. These two under-appreciated approaches show how an adaptation of thought and action to the demands of the natural and social world explain how learning and coming to know are possible. These insights are as relevant today as they were when the chapters were first written.

This book addresses fundamental questions in relation to education and its epistemology. The position taken by the author is critical realist; and thus throughout the relationship between education and critical realism is foregrounded. Themes and issues that surface at different times in the book are: a critical realist view of education research; a resolution of the quantitative/qualitative divide; criteria for judging the worth of educational texts and practices; differences between scientific and critical realisms; empirical research methods in education; structure-agency relationships; pragmatist views of educational research; foundations and paradigmatic differences; and educational critique and transformation.