Generative AI (AI) can produce acceptable academic work without requiring students to perform the activity the work was meant to cultivate. Duncan Pritchard argues that this threatens intellectual-character formation because AI can substitute for the executive cognitive activity through which intellectual virtues are exercised. This article accepts that danger and works within Pritchard’s framework while pressing three unresolved transition points. First, AI engagement is not exhausted by cognitive surrender: substitutional, integrative, and evaluative relations distribute cognitive work and epistemic authority differently. Second, finished products remain evidence of learning, but generative AI weakens the warrants by which educators infer student-controlled judgment from them. Visible-reasoning designs can distribute that evidentiary burden across linked representations of assumption testing, comparison, revision, source checking, and evaluation. Third, neither protected unaided activity nor structured evaluative engagement establishes intellectual character from isolated performances. Students may enact virtue-related conduct strategically or selectively. The formative question is whether truth-directed judgment persists across AI-present and AI-absent, scaffolded and unscaffolded, rewarded and unrewarded contexts. On this account, educational prescriptions should follow diagnosis of the activity and the location of consequential judgment rather than the mere presence or absence of AI.
Black men have long served as transformative educators and community leaders, yet they remain significantly underrepresented in K–12 educational leadership. This systematic literature review examines factors shaping Black male leadership and identifies relational processes that support the diversification of leadership pipelines. Guided by the transformational leadership in Black male contexts (TL-BMC) framework, which emerged inductively from the review, this study centers relational trust, equity-focused purpose, and leadership enacted within racialized organizational contexts. Analysis of 65 sources revealed four interrelated themes: (a) historical disruptions and role complexity; (b) persistent underrepresentation, attrition, and limited advancement opportunities; (c) leadership pipeline development through mentoring and sponsorship; and (d) cultural competence and leadership strain. Findings indicate that culturally responsive mentoring functions as a care infrastructure, providing relational, psychosocial, cultural, and professional supports that strengthen leadership identity, resilience, belonging, and equity-oriented practice. Sponsorship complements these supports by increasing access to professional networks, visibility, and advancement opportunities. Together, mentoring and sponsorship help mitigate structural barriers to leadership mobility and sustainability. The review highlights these evidence-based strategies as essential for strengthening leadership pathways, retention, and representation among Black male educators.
This paper conducts a bibliometric science-mapping analysis of international research on Socio-Scientific Issues (SSI) in Science Education. Although SSI research has expanded considerably, limited attention has been given to how the field is organized thematically, intellectually, socially, and epistemologically. To address this gap, the study analyzes 738 articles indexed in the Web of Science and published between 2010 and 2026. The bibliometric analysis was performed using VOSviewer and included keyword co-occurrence, document bibliographic coupling, author co-citation, and country co-authorship networks. The results indicate that SSI research is thematically polycentric, organized around pedagogical-curricular mediations, cognitive and argumentative processes, normative and civic orientations, and institutional anchoring in educational levels and disciplinary contexts. Temporal keyword analysis identified emerging topics such as systems thinking, STEAM, professional development, media literacy, inquiry-based learning, COVID-19, engagement, and epistemic beliefs, while argumentation, scientific literacy, decision-making, Nature of Science, reasoning, and environmental education remain stabilized thematic cores. Bibliographic coupling revealed contemporary intellectual cores marked by both continuity and renewal, while author co-citation analysis identified a differentiated intellectual canon around authors such as Sadler, Zeidler, Osborne, Kolstø, Hodson, Lederman, and others. Country co-authorship analysis showed that SSI research circulates internationally through uneven but interconnected collaboration routes. Interpreted through Ludwik Fleck’s epistemology, these patterns indicate processes of thought-style stabilization, thought-collective formation, and thought traffic within the WoS-indexed international SSI literature. The study contributes to Science Education by providing a relational and epistemologically informed diagnosis of the field, with implications for curriculum development, teacher education, and future research agendas.
Reciprocal teaching is a cooperative learning strategy designed to enhance students’ comprehension through predicting, questioning, clarifying, summarising, visualising, calculating, connecting, and giving feedback. This study examines its impact on students’ attitudes toward learning physics in Palestinian secondary schools, addressing a critical gap in the literature. Given the challenges of teaching physics, the research explores how reciprocal teaching fosters student engagement. A quasi-experimental design was employed with 120 10th-grade students (60 males, 60 females) from gender-segregated Palestinian schools. The experimental group received instruction using reciprocal teaching, while the control group followed traditional methods. Pre- and post-questionnaires, based on an adapted “Attitude towards Learning Physics” scale, were used for data collection. A one-way MANCOVA analyzed group differences. Findings indicate that students taught with reciprocal teaching developed significantly more positive attitudes toward physics than those in traditional instruction. While both male and female students benefited, a significant interaction between teaching method and gender was observed. These results highlight reciprocal teaching as an effective approach to enhancing engagement and motivation in physics education. The study provides valuable insights for educators seeking innovative strategies to improve student attitudes toward physics, particularly in contexts where engagement with the subject is challenging.
This conceptual paper draws on decolonial perspectives and a critical interpretive review of education reform discourses and secondary literature to examine contradictions in contemporary decolonisation agendas across purposively selected Sub-Saharan African contexts. It advances two central arguments. First, many initiatives labelled as decolonisation remain confined to surface-level reforms that leave intact colonial architectures of power, knowledge and being. Second, the decolonisation agenda is increasingly co-opted by neoliberal imperatives that narrow educational purpose to economic instrumentalism and constrain possibilities for genuine epistemic and structural transformation. The review identifies how these contradictions operate through curriculum, language, pedagogy, vocationalisation, employability and future-of-work narratives, while recognising that competency-based, learner-centred, vocational and digital reforms may also carry emancipatory possibilities. To reclaim the emancipatory potential of decolonisation, the paper calls for (a) radically re-centring educational values and purposes beyond market logics and (b) deconstructing the neoliberal ideological foundations embedded in contemporary reform narratives. The foundational values to be reclaimed are neither uniform nor timeless but encompass contextually varied commitments to relational personhood, communal responsibility, self-reliance, civic agency, environmental stewardship, linguistic and epistemic plurality, cultural continuity and epistemic freedom. The paper advances a context-sensitive decolonisation agenda that repositions African education towards expansive, humanistic and socially transformative purposes.
