After years of research and theorisation connected to education for sustainable development, the holistic core of sustainability seems to have disappeared within the frames of the social, environmental and economic pillars. This article suggests a post-humanism inspired understanding of a sense of belonging. Even though the phenomenon of belonging is ascribed to social sustainability, the post-human theoretical toolkit challenges the humanism-based understanding of a sense of belonging as a human-related phenomenon. Using Deleuze and Guattari’s rhizome and affect concepts and Barad’s concept of intra-action, we show the connections between the human and nonhuman elements constituting each other in our world. We conclude with the implications that using post-human language (to understand belonging) may have for policy, Early Childhood Education and care (ECEC) practice and theory.

This article focuses on student persistence in Higher Education. It examines qualities that enable students to persist in their studies despite the challenges they face, and key factors interplaying with and affecting these qualities. This study utilised the explanatory mixed-methods approach. It comprised a faculty-wide survey which explained the relationships between and across variables. Focus group interviews explored significant predictors of students' persistence. Results from this study showed that, among other things, key drivers of student persistence were personal optimism, academic engagement, and positive relationships. Students' decision to stay on and complete their studies determines their persistence; but there also remains a major role to be played by institutions. Successful student persistence tends to be a result of an intricate interaction between the student's personal factors and their environmentand the institution is a key component of that environment.

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The impact of colonisation, cognitive imperialism, and Eurocentric modes of knowing, being and doing has had an effect on Higher Education, including teacher education. Colonial epistemologies, epistemicide, academic dependency, disempowerment and intellectual inferiority are challenged by liberatory pedagogies that present opportunities to reconceptualise ontological and epistemic foundations to inform antiracist practice and decolonial praxis. However, prevailing teacher education policies of standardisation in England raise difficult obstacles against decolonial and anti-racist practices. By acknowledging the existence of institutionalised forms of coloniality, which includes the reproduction of colonial-modernistwestern modes of thinking and doing, a re-imagined decolonial reality can be envisioned. We argue that this process can engender humanising, antiracist, and epistemically liberating pedagogies within teacher education, which can encourage the co-existence of a diverse plurality of forms of knowing, being and doing. Through conversational semi-structured interviews with nine teacher educators, enriched by a critical analytic ethnographic study, the findings suggest perceptible evidence of teacher educators' growing

Portfolios have been used in learning for a while. The value of the use of portfolios for learning has been well documented. For example, portfolios encourage students to reflect on their strengths, needs, errors, interests, challenges, and objectives, as well as, encourage interactive processes among students, teachers, and parents. Thus, it is value to strengthen the use of portfolio, for instance, by making use of appropriate pedagogical approaches and technological adoption. This research seeks to highlight the evolvement of use of portfolios from paper based in academic year 2015/2016, to an electronic portfolio in the form of a word-processed document in academic year 2016/2017 to students creating e-portfolios in academic year 2017/2018. To capture this process prior to the academic year 2017/18 academic year students had been required to keep portfolios in the form of a word-processed document or paper based. The results show that the adoption of technology and improved pedagogical techniques enhanced students' educational performance and satisfaction. Therefore, this research advocates for the adoption of technologically-driven pedagogical philosophy to enhance the use of portfolios in learning and teaching.