Search Results (29)

This study examines the moral agency of French secondary school headteachers through the lens of the theory of conventions. Using qualitative data from interviews with fifteen headteachers involved in professional development, this study explores how these leaders justify their practices within a centralized, bureaucratic, and hierarchical education system. It identifies a variety of conventions—civic, domestic, industrial, project, market, inspired, and fame—that headteachers draw on to navigate institutional constraints, manage professional relationships, and foster pedagogical and organizational change. Particular attention is given to how civic and domestic conventions shape leadership discourse and practices, especially regarding trust building, decision making, and reform implementation. We also compare the French context with international examples from the International Successful School Principalship Project (ISSPP), focusing on Nordic countries, where leadership emphasizes democratic participation, professional trust, and shared responsibility. This study underscores the uniqueness of the French leadership model, which resists managerial and market logics while remaining rooted in republican and egalitarian ideals. It concludes by advocating for a more context-aware, ethically grounded, and dialogical approach to school leadership. Full article

Proclaiming Our Roots (POR) began as an academic community-based research initiative documenting Afro-Indigenous identities and lived experiences through digital oral storytelling. Since its inception, Proclaiming Our Roots has grown into a grassroots social movement focused on self-determination, cultural reclamation, and resistance to colonial erasure. This paper explores Proclaiming Our Root’s evolution, from a research project to a grassroots social movement, analyzing how storytelling, relational accountability, and Indigenous, Black, and Afro-Indigenous governance have shaped its development. Drawing on Indigenous methodologies and grounded in Afro-Indigenous worldviews, we examine how POR mobilizes digital storytelling, community gatherings, and intergenerational dialog to give voice to Afro-Indigenous identity, build collective consciousness, and challenge dominant narratives that erase or marginalize Black, Indigenous, and Afro-Indigenous presence. Through a sharing circle involving Proclaiming Our Roots community members, advisory council members, and the research team, in this paper we identify key themes that reflect the movement’s transformative impact: Identity and Belonging, Storytelling as Decolonial Praxis, Healing, Spirituality and Collective Consciousness, and Resistance and Social Movement Building. We discuss how these themes illustrate Proclaiming Our Roots’ dual role as a site of knowledge production and political action, navigating tensions between institutional affiliation and community autonomy. By prioritizing Afro-Indigenous epistemologies and centering lived experience, POR demonstrates how academic research can be a foundation for long-term, relational, and community-led movement-building. In this paper, we want to contribute to broader discussions around the sustainability of grassroots movements, the role of storytelling in social change for Indigenous and Black Peoples, and the possibilities of decolonial knowledge production as epistemic justice. We offer a model for how academic research-initiated projects can remain accountable to the communities with whom we work, while actively participating in liberatory re-imaginings. Full article

The rapid advancement of Large Language Models (LLMs) has led to substantial investment in enhancing their capabilities and expanding their feature sets. Despite these developments, a critical gap remains between model sophistication and their dependable deployment in real-world applications. A key concern is the inconsistency of LLM-generated outputs in production environments, which hinders scalability and reliability. In response to these challenges, we propose a novel framework that integrates custom-defined, rule-based logic to constrain and guide LLM behavior effectively. This framework enforces deterministic response boundaries while considering the model’s reasoning capabilities. Furthermore, we introduce a quantitative performance scoring mechanism that achieves an 85.5% improvement in response consistency, facilitating more predictable and accountable model outputs. The proposed system is industry-agnostic and can be generalized to any domain with a well-defined validation schema. This work contributes to the growing research on aligning LLMs with structured, operational constraints to ensure safe, robust, and scalable deployment. Full article

This study examines how young children engage with picturebooks, discussion, dramatic inquiry, and writing to negotiate diverse perspectives and develop empathy in an early childhood classroom. Grounded in sociocultural and critical literacy theories, the research explores the role of dialogic pedagogy in fostering young learners’ agency and social awareness. Utilizing a qualitative single-case study design, data were collected over a full academic year in a second-grade classroom through video recordings, field notes, interviews, and student artifacts. Thematic analysis revealed that dialogic engagements supported students in developing a shared language about empathy, resolving classroom conflicts, and exploring actionable ways to support others through collaborative play and inquiry. Findings highlight how sustained, student-driven inquiry fosters critical reflection and social responsibility, offering pedagogical insights into designing literacy experiences that nurture empathy, agency, and collective action. Implications for integrating dialogic literacy practices into early childhood education are discussed. Full article

This study proposes Tewahedo epistemology, an Ethiopian knowledge system grounded in the Ge’ez language, as a decolonial framework for re-visualizing academic literacy in higher education. Tewahedo, meaning “oneness” or “unity”, integrates multiliteracies—written, oral, spatial, and visual—within a communal and culturally embedded ethos through its Tergwame (ትርጓሜ) epistemes and Andǝmta (አንድምታ) traditions. The aim of the article is to challenge the dominance of skills-based literacy models by positioning Tewahedo as a decolonized alternative, emphasizing contextualized knowledge, communal meaning-making, and epistemic belonging. Through a literature review, the study explores Andəmta as a communal and dialogic system of knowledge sharing, rooted in Ge’ez and Amharic hermeneutics. This framework serves as a template for Africanizing and decolonizing contemporary academic literacy development. Findings reveal that Tewahedo epistemology offers ancient yet innovative strategies for fostering interpretive, explanatory, and multimodal competencies in academia. The study argues that adopting a unified Tewahedo-based academic literacy framework can cultivate intellectual agency, decolonize educational spaces, and center Indigenous Knowledge Systems. It calls for educational reforms that promote cultural diversity, legitimize Indigenous Knowledge Systems, and nurture academic belonging for students in multilingual and multicultural contexts. Full article

This study investigates the integration of Artificial Intelligence (AI) in Religious Education (RE), a field traditionally rooted in spiritual formation and human interaction. Amid increasing digital transformation in education, theological institutions are exploring AI tools for teaching, assessment, and pastoral engagement. Using a critical literature review and analysis of institutional case studies, the paper examines the historical development of AI in education, current applications in general and theological contexts, and the ethical challenges it introduces, especially regarding decision making, data privacy, and bias as well as didactically grounded opportunities such as AI-mediated dialogic simulations. The study identifies both the pedagogical advantages of AI, such as personalization and administrative efficiency, and the risks of theological distortion, overreliance, and epistemic conformity. It presents a range of real-world implementations from institutions like Harvard Divinity School and the Oxford Centre for Digital Theology, highlighting best practices and cautionary approaches. The findings suggest that AI can enrich RE when deployed thoughtfully and ethically, but it must not replace the relational and formational aspects central to RE. The paper concludes by recommending policy development, ethical oversight, and interdisciplinary collaboration to guide responsible integration. This research contributes to the growing discourse on how AI can be aligned with the spiritual and intellectual goals of RE in a rapidly evolving digital age. Full article

Dialogue needs provocative interlocutors. Instilling a grave and shuddering awakening to the conscience, Emmanuel Levinas has provided a corpus of writings unveiling an immemorial horizon and divine calling of infinite responsibility before the other, the brother/sister stranger. Roger Burggraeve has animated Levinas’ writings within a Christian theological horizon as a source of formation in the service of promoting biblical wisdom and love in the life of faith. The writings of Pope Benedict XVI and Pope Francis together portray a Catholic theological gravity to bring dialogue into a spiritual, practical, and social domain. Accordingly, this article develops the notion of dialogue within a Jewish and Christian lens by introducing the sense of the non-reciprocal character of dialogue, an asymmetrical relation of responsibility to the other evidencing the preconditions of dialogue. Levinas’ notion of non-reciprocal dialogue, taken further by the writings of Burggraeve, reveals a pre-original affectivity or ‘dialogical’ character of interpersonal relations of commitment respecting the other’s mystery and unknowability. This means that the dialogical relation is a pathway of ethical transcendence, a holy ground evoking an integral human ecology of maternity and fraternity. Such covenantal alterity in spiritual theological terms signifies an affectivity of atonement and redemptive love. In this way, the movement towards dialogue reveals a synodal path and holy ground to walk together and imagine an integral ecology of difference and mystery to transform words into sacrifice and truth into redemptive love. Journeying together upon such holy ground witnesses to a spiritual theology of dialogue envisioning a place to hear the “good news” (Lk 4:16) and encounter “the hunger and thirst for righteousness” (Matt 5:6). Full article

This study aims to understand university professors’ perspectives on the learning assessment process, including its importance during teaching and learning, their conceptualization, and their considerations in their practices. The research used a grounded theory approach to recognize evaluation as a dialogical and intersubjective space. The methodology consisted of an open survey and a semi-structured interview with faculty professors from a university in northern Mexico. The findings highlighted the importance of educational institutions, emphasizing that faculties prioritize evaluating quality based on relevance, alignment with learning objectives, continuity throughout the process, and feedback. These aspects align with recent approaches that consider evaluation as a process that promotes learning, as evidenced by the high saturation rate in the theoretical sampling. Furthermore, the study revealed that the institution’s educational model, curricular design, and evaluation policies significantly influence the faculty members’ perspective. As a result, educational institutions must consider these factors when formulating an evaluation model, thereby making the research directly applicable to the work of educational policymakers and university professors. Full article

Contemporary biopolitical discourse around fundamental rights and societal representations has increasingly weaponized moral-based attitudes and personal feelings, eschewing informed, factual opinions grounded in observation, data analysis, and scientific research. This trend is evident in the treatment of the queer community—used here as an umbrella term for non-cisgender, non-heterosexual individuals. Over recent years, the group has become the primary target of negationist critiques aimed at undermining the very existence of the community and challenging its rights. This article argues that the rise of depersonalized interactions and individualism, particularly through social media (where superficial and sensationalist content thrives, often at the expense of nuanced, data-driven discourse), the cult of the self and power (which prioritizes individual success, sidelining the collective struggles and rights of marginalized groups), and misinformation, is strategically employed by those in power and reverberated through the general public. These elements serve as a translucent veil, enabling the conscious choice to avoid engaging in structured, complex, and informed discussions about queer people’s rights and their existence. Consequently, the strategic deployment of these tactics, with the aim of shaping public opinion based on falsehoods and emotional appeals, undermines the capacity for informed dialog and perpetuates the marginalization of the queer community. Full article

Team sport games, as a deep-rooted facet of physical education, have been upheld throughout the history of this school subject area. The confining of teaching games instruction and assessment to isolated skills, as well as the selective pressure of competition, generate serious problems for dealing with the diversity and inclusion of all students in physical education classes. Framed using the Salamanca Declaration for inclusive education, the purpose of this paper is to contribute to the discussion on renewing and bettering the opportunities for accessing, participating, and learning team sports gameplay in physical education. DeLuca’s four conceptions of inclusion (normative, integrative, dialogical, and transgressive) constitute the analytical framework adopted to support the discussion about the game-based models’ learning goals, strategies, and the ways to contribute to dealing with students’ diversity and inclusion. The discussion breaks new ground by emphasizing dialogical and transgressive inclusion in teaching games in physical education advocating for co-regulation and team regulation through active co-construction by students and teachers. These efforts ultimately aim to cultivate more inclusive and equitable physical education learning environments, fostering a sustainable and socially just society. Full article

Dialogue relation extraction identifies semantic relations between entity pairs in dialogues. This research explores a methodology harnessing the potential of prompt-based fine-tuning paired with a trigger-generation approach. Capitalizing on the intrinsic knowledge of pre-trained language models, this strategy employs triggers that underline the relation between entities decisively. In particular, diverging from the conventional extractive methods seen in earlier research, our study leans towards a generative manner for trigger generation. The dialogue-based relation extraction (DialogeRE) benchmark dataset features multi-utterance environments of colloquial speech by multiple speakers, making it critical to capture meaningful clues for inferring relational facts. In the benchmark, empirical results reveal significant performance boosts in few-shot scenarios, where the availability of examples is notably limited. Nevertheless, the scarcity of ground-truth triggers for training hints at potential further refinements in the trigger-generation module, especially when ample examples are present. When evaluating the challenges of dialogue relation extraction, combining prompt-based learning with trigger generation offers pronounced improvements in both full-shot and few-shot scenarios. Specifically, integrating a meticulously crafted manual initialization method with the prompt-based model—considering prior distributional insights and relation class semantics—substantially surpasses the baseline. However, further advancements in trigger generation are warranted, especially in data-abundant contexts, to maximize performance enhancements. Full article

This paper is founded on two philosophical assumptions. The first is that there is a difference between two patterns of recognition: the dialectical and the dialogical. The second assumption is that the origins of the dialogical pattern may be found in the relationship between human beings and God, a relationship in which prayer has a major role. The second assumption leads to the supposition that the emphasis of the dialogic approach on moral responsibility is theologically grounded. In other words, the relationship between humanity and God serves as a paradigm for human relationships. By focusing on Hermann Cohen and Franz Rosenzweig, in the context of prayer and dialectic, this paper highlights the complexity of these themes in modern Jewish thought. These two important philosophers utilize dialectical reasoning while also criticizing it and offering an alternative. The conclusions of their thought, in general, and their position on prayer, in particular, demonstrate a preference for a relational way of thinking over a dialectical one, but without renouncing the latter. Full article

This article compares the relational anthropologies of Martin Luther and Martin Buber and suggests that both thinkers presuppose a notion of creative dialogue. This notion captures the understanding in the Hebrew Bible of the world as created and sustained through God’s utterance and, thus, of reality as spoken and human existence as reliant upon dialogue with God. It argues that this common grounding led Luther and Buber to suggest anthropologies that focus on relation rather than substance, on the role of language, and on creative dialogue as the kernel of sound interpersonal relationships, which articulate the human relationship with God. The perception of reality as constituted through dialogical relationships made them both question the prevailing philosophical ontology of their time: in Luther’s case, Aristotelean substance ontology, and in Buber’s case, Kantian subject–object dualism. Full article

This article shows that and how Raymund Schwager’s five-act dramatic Christology is at the same time a theology of divine action that takes a Christological, personal, dialogical and dramatic approach. Secondly, this article develops a methodological approach of Jesus in the Drama of Salvation, in which Schwager draws on Anselm of Canterbury and thus understands theology as an unfinishable project of “conversion of thought”. This methodology is developed further in the form of a continuous self-application of theological insights to one’s own theology, so that Schwager’s dramatic five-act theology of divine action opens up to ever new readings. In this way, thirdly, Schwager’s dramatic theology of the Gospels is developed in the direction of a biblically based dramatic-kairological phenomenology of divine action. According to this, God acts through and in Jesus by means of events that make the kingdom of God present to people in an exemplary way, thus pulling them out of previous entanglements of catastrophe and placing them in situations of new beginnings. This liberating action of God towards salvation does not overwhelm the free choice of human beings, but places them in Kairoi, i.e., in extraordinary times of salvation, in which they are released to actively accept this offer of salvation in favour of a salvific self-transformation, or to reject God in an aggravated way. On the methodological path described above, this kairological salvific action of God, mediated by Jesus’ proclamation of the kingdom of God and by the work of the Holy Spirit, is grounded in God’s new creative action of the incarnation of Jesus Christ. In this way there emerges an expanded sphere for God’s personal and dramatic kairological salvific action, which embraces the whole of creation. Full article

As the world faces progressive and interconnected global crises and conflicts, the educational expectations set out in the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development are in jeopardy. With the COVID-19 pandemic in its third year, the war in Ukraine has exacerbated the food, energy, humanitarian, and refugee crises, all against the backdrop of an unfolding climate emergency. The aim of this research is to analyse the challenges faced by postgraduate programmes in training human talent for sustainable development on the basis of Grounded Theory. To do so, we have used a dialogical intervention through the complementary experiences of authorities of higher-education institutions that live day by day for a fair, quality, and sustainable education. With a naturalistic qualitative method, where the hermeneutic analysis procedure is structured in five phases, and with data from key informants from 9 countries, 20 interviews are obtained with key informants in Latin American and Spanish universities during 2021, according to inclusion criteria such as: belonging to a higher-education institution, with a doctorate degree, with more than 10 years of experience in management, and training in postgraduate programmes. The data are processed through ATLAS.ti9, which allows for the analysis of the key informants’ discourses. The findings show that the university institutions that currently offer postgraduate programmes are considering improving the quality of education; the first challenge is to redesign the curricula according to the demands of the current and future world, incorporating technological resources and knowledge of the environment; inter- and transdisciplinary curricula that form enterprising postgraduates with a solid ethical life project; critical, complex, and systemic thinking. Full article