Ontological alternatives in higher education: Case study of the Ecoversities Alliance
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This article is grounded in the belief that the ontological foundations of mainstream higher education institutions contribute to the interrelated crises threatening life on Earth. As dominant higher education models face increasing scrutiny for perpetuating systemic injustices, alternative approaches are emerging as critical spaces for rethinking the philosophical underpinnings of education and imagining more sustainable futures. Within this context, the study focuses on the Ecoversities Alliance—a network of over 260 alternative higher education initiatives—and investigates the ontological foundations informing these alternatives. The research draws on a thematic analysis of 28 documents authored by Alliance members and 10 interviews with founding members or directors. The findings reveal contrasts between the ontological conceptions of reality, existence, space, and time embraced by ecoversities and those upheld by mainstream HEIs. Overall, the article illuminates how coexisting educational models grounded in distinct ontologies may offer pathways for addressing social and ecological crises.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".