John Baillie Henderson: A hydrologist in colonial Brisbane

Colonial pediatrics in the 1600s: governor John Winthrop the younger of Connecticut.

It is hard for us to imagine the experience of parenting in colonial New England, where infectious diseases such as smallpox, measles, and diphtheria swept through communities and over one-fifth of the infants in some communities never lived to see their first birthday. Evidence from the 17th century is particularly sparse. Physicians were almost nonexistent. Mothers no doubt provided much medi...

Learning by Undoing, Democracy and Education, and John Dewey, the Colonial Traveler

The centennial anniversary of John Dewey’s Democracy and Education has been celebrated this year in a reconstructive and utility-based spirit. The article considers this spirit and the need to complement it with a critical-deconstructive and ‘use-less’ prism that will reveal shortcomings in Dewey’s and our own political pedagogies. Gleanings from Dewey’s book allow us to begin with what most ed...

Graphing Henderson Creek: A Case of Relations in Sociomaterial Practice

Introduction Over the past decade, it has almost become a truism to say that the mathematics in school and the mathematics in everyday settings are considerably different, and often incommensurable. However, it is much less evident what the competencies are people bring to (implicit or explicit) mathematical tasks in everyday situations. In the following episode, Nadine, a beginning mathematics...

Philosophy in John Gardner’s Grendel

John Gardner’s Grendel is a celebrated example of the ontological postmodernist fiction. Along with a discovery of self with which Grendel the narrator of the novel is concerned, grand narratives such as philosophy are questioned. Grendel denies the external objective reality and generously allows the legitimacy of fantastic and non-realistic methods by using “life-affirming fabulous art” as it...

David Willis Wilson Henderson, 1903-1968.