Commentary: Expanding conceptualizations for the study of learning

There are always theoretical assumptions involved in research. Theoretical assumptions determine which phenomena are visible and which are invisible and they make different educational goals and pedagogical strategies either thinkable or unthinkable. This collection of articles expands the dialogue about educational research by exploring a range of different ways of conceptually framing education. Each different conceptualisation reveals a different set of objects and relationships and so opens up different ways of thinking about educational goals. For example, Tsafrir Goldberg and Baruch Schwarz bring emotion into the frame in a study which suggests that conventional approaches to education that ignore emotion do so at a cost. Goldberg and Schwarz suggest, with evidence, that by engaging with emotion explicitly we can improve the quality of argumentation and so have a cognitive learning gain. This example illustrates the value of seeing education through a new conceptual frame. Implicit in their account is the potential to understand educational goals in a new way, switching from thinking of education in terms of cognitive development to thinking of it in terms of emotional development. A similar account can be given of each of the articles in this special issue. Each claims to enrich our understanding by foregrounding a different aspect of the complex whole of education thereby enabling us to think in new ways about the nature of education and the goals of education.