ABSTRACT
This introductory chapter addresses issues to do with the epistemic framework of this book – a dispositional or conceptual realism. All this and more needs to be established before the central argument of this or any other book can be attended to. This means that concepts, such as imagination (imagining), gender (gendering), care (caring), justification (justifying) and indigeneity (indigenizing), and historical events, such as the introduction of play pedagogies in schools, the transformation of special educational needs at the policy and practice levels and episodes in the struggle to decolonize the curriculum round the world, are central to how we understand the concept and practice of learning – the central concept in the book. All of them have a direct relationship with learning and can be positioned in the field of learning or education. However, these positionings need to be made explicit or at least good reasons need to be provided for their inclusion in this field.
