Showing papers in "Educational Theory in 2006"

Reflection in education: a kantian epistemology

Abstract: As even its defenders admit, reflection in education suffers from a lack of conceptual clarity. In this essay, Henk Procee provides a philosophical analysis of the central concepts in this domain. In the current literature, these concepts are usually taken from the pragmatic school of John Dewey and from critical social theory associated with Jurgen Habermas. In contrast, Procee argues that Kant’s philosophy incorporates ideas better suited to understanding reflection in education — particularly through his distinction between understanding ("Verstand") and judgment ("Urteilskraft"), a distinction that supports an epistemology that accepts the special nature of reflection as judgment as opposed to formal learning (which, in Kant’s analysis, is part of understanding). In addition, Procee discusses some consequences for the aims and methods of reflection in education.

The feminization of teaching and the practice of teaching: threat or opportunity?

Abstract: In this essay, Morwenna Griffiths considers the effect of feminization on the practices of education. She outlines a feminist theory of practice that draws critically on theories of embodiment, diversity, and structures of power to show that any practice is properly seen as fluid, leaky, and viscous. Examining different and competing understandings of “feminization”— referring either to the numbers of women in teaching or to a culture associated with women — Griffith argues that concerns about increasing number of women teachers are misplaced. She complicates the cultural question, observing that masculine practices have a hegemonic form while feminized practices have developed in resistance to these, and she ultimately argues that hegemonic masculinity, not feminization, is the problem because it drives out diversity. Griffiths concludes that the leaky, viscous practices of teaching would benefit from the increased diversity and decreased social stratification feminization brings to the profession.

“emotional intelligence” in the classroom? an aristotelian critique

Abstract: A recent trend in moral education, social and emotional learning, incorporates the mantra of emotional intelligence (EI) as a key element in an extensive program of character building. In making his famous claim that the good life would have to include appropriate emotions, Aristotle obviously considered the schooling of emotions to be an indispensable part of moral education. However, in this essay Kristjan Kristjansson casts doubt on the assumption that Aristotelians should approve of the clarion call for EI, as understood by Daniel Goleman and the proponents of social and emotional learning, in the classroom. Various marked differences between EI and Aristotelian emotional virtue are highlighted and explored. Kristjansson argues that the claims of EI lack moral ballast and that when this fact is added to an existing heap of educational problems attached to the implementation of EI programs, educators had better rethink their reliance on EI as a model of emotion cultivation, and perhaps revert to the teachings of Aristotle himself.

Witnessing in the classroom: the ethics and politics of affect

Abstract: In this essay, Michalinos Zembylas explores the meaning of affect and its importance to educational efforts to create the classroom conditions necessary for students and teachers to become critical witnesses to trauma and oppression. Zembylas draws out some of the ethical and political possibilities that emerge through such efforts, and extends our thinking about the affective possibilities of witnessing. His aims are threefold: (1) to discuss the nature of affect and the affective economies of witnessing; (2) to show some of the ways in which classrooms and affect interact to produce a particular politics and ethics, especially in contexts of historical trauma; and (3) to provide a sketch of how progressive pedagogies based on witnessing can educate toward an understanding of affect that may encourage a transformative political response.

Race, Culture, and the Education of African Americans

Abstract: In this essay, Marvin Lynn explores a range of perspectives on African American education, with particular focus on three works: Black American Students in an Affluent Suburb: A Study of Academic Disengagement, by social anthropologist John Ogbu; African-Centered Pedagogy: Developing Schools of Achievement for African American Children, by teacher education expert Peter Murrell; and African American Literacies, by Elaine Richardson, professor of English and applied linguistics. Lynn draws on Charles Valentine's sociological framework for understanding culture in order to interrogate how the concept of culture is used in these works. Lynn concludes that critical race theory in education — a rapidly emerging discourse on schooling and inequality — may be a useful tool for lucidly framing the conditions under which African Americans are educated as well as the possible solutions to the perennial problems faced by this historically marginalized group.

The “permanent deposit” of hegelian thought in dewey’s theory of inquiry

Abstract: In this essay, Jim Garrison explores the emerging scholarship establishing a Hegelian continuity in John Dewey’s thought from his earliest publications to the work published in the last decade of his life. The primary goals of this study are, first, to introduce this new scholarship to philosophers of education and, second, to extend this analysis to new domains, including Dewey’s theory of inquiry, universals, and creative action. Ultimately, Garrison’s analysis also refutes the traditional account that claims that William James converted Dewey from Hegelian idealism, after which Charles Sanders Peirce inspired him to rebuild his instrumentalism along radically different lines.

Dewey’s epistemology: an argument for warranted assertions, knowing, and meaningful classroom practice

Abstract: In an effort to navigate the treacherous path between professionalism and social relevancy, this essay takes up an area of professional philosophy — epistemology — with the intention of reclaiming the integrative role John Dewey held for philosophy and classroom practice. Deron Boyles asserts that epistemology can and should represent an area of inquiry that is relevant and useful for philosophy of education, especially as it develops classroom practices that foster inquiry. He specifically seeks to revive Dewey’s conception of warranted assertibility in an effort to show the value of fallibilist epistemology in practical and social teaching and learning contexts. By highlighting the distinctions between traditional epistemology and Dewey’s conception of knowing, Boyles demonstrates that epistemology has value insofar as it highlights a more useful, instrumentalist theory of knowing that is applicable to classroom practice.

Education as initiation into practices

Abstract: In this essay, Paul Smeyers and Nicholas Burbules reexamine the concept of “practice” and propose a new way of conceiving it that does justice to the idea that education is in some sense an initiation into practices without endorsing either the conservative and reproductive conception of what initiation entails or the radically social constructionist idea that all practices are arbitrary and groundless. First, drawing from the work of Ludwig Wittgenstein, Alasdair MacIntyre, and Charles Taylor, Smeyers and Burbules outline how the centrality of the concept of “practice” should be understood. Second, they indicate how the concept has come under pressure to the extent that one may doubt whether there are any “practices” left in contemporary society. Third, they differentiate between different kinds of practices in terms of how they are learned and how they are enacted, and suggest the central role that narrativization plays in these processes. They conclude that a theoretical focus on initiation into practices need not lead either to conservative or to relativistic conclusions.

Engaging democratic education in the neoliberal age

Abstract: For the democratic tradition to return to a vanguard position in education requires a thorough exploration of the problems of democratization in education and an inventory of possible new forms. In this essay, Simon Marginson reviews five books concerned with democracy and education: Michael Apple’s Educating the “Right” Way, Denis Carlson’s Leaving Safe Harbors, A. Belden Fields and Walter Feinberg’s Education and Democratic Theory, Trevor Gale and Kathleen Densmore’s Engaging Teachers, and Klas Roth’s Democracy, Education and Citizenship. While these authors imagine democracy in somewhat different ways, they have a common interest in the role of public schooling in the formation of democratic agents and practices. The books do not offer a definitive account of the problems of democratization, nor do they embody a major breakthrough in democratic educational thinking, but they all provide helpful explorations of these issues. Marginson concludes with some thoughts on commodification and neoliberal economism in education, a contemporary focus of discussion in democratic educational circles.

Education for social justice: provocations and challenges

Abstract: In this essay review of three recent edited books (Greg Dimitriadis and Dennis Carlson’s Promises to Keep: Cultural Studies, Democratic Education, and Public Life; Nadine Dolby and Greg Dimitriadis’s Learning to Labor in New Times; and Francisco Ibanez-Carrasco and Erica Meiner’s Disruptive Readings on Making Curriculum Public), Kathy Hytten reflects on the relation among education, democracy, and social justice. She argues that in our current climate, progressive educators need a more powerful and compelling educational discourse that foregrounds issues of social justice. The three books under review in this essay provide a number of resources for this discourse. Hytten explores these contributions in relation to the theories that animate education for social justice, in particular, critical pedagogy, globalization theory, and cultural studies. In the end, she revisits the vision and promise of education for social justice, considering what these edited collections offer, reflecting on their gaps and weaknesses, and providing some direction for what kind of work we still need to make social justice a reality.

Theorizing the university as a cultural system: distinctions, identities, emergencies

Abstract: Universities currently face new environmental demands and significant internal complexities that appear to challenge their traditional modes of work and organization — and thus their very identities. In this essay, Mark Considine argues that the prospect of such changes requires us to reflect carefully upon the theoretical and normative underpinnings of universities and to delineate the structures and processes through which they might seek to negotiate their identities. Considine re-theorizes the university as a higher education system composed by distinctions and networks acting through an important class of boundary objects. He moves beyond an environmental analysis, asserting that systems are best theorized as cultural practices based upon actors making and protecting important kinds of distinctions. Thus, the university system must be investigated as a knowledge-based binary for dividing knowledge from other things. This approach, in turn, produces an identity-centering (cultural) model of the system that assumes universities must perform two different acts of distinction to exist: first, they must distinguish themselves from other systems (such as the economy, organized religion, and the labor market), and, second, they must operate successfully in a chosen resource environment. Ultimately, Considine argues that while environmental problems (such as cuts in government grants) may generate periodic crises, threats within identities produce emergencies generating a radical kind of problematic for actor networks.

The School as an Exceptional Space: Rethinking Education from the Perspective of the Biopedagogical.

Abstract: In this essay, Tyson Lewis theorizes current lockdown practices, zero-tolerance policies, and No Child Left Behind initiatives in U.S. schooling by drawing on Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben’s analysis of the concentration camp and the state of exception. Agamben’s theory of the camp provides a challenging, critical vantage point for looking at the ambiguities that emerge from the complex field of disciplinary procedures now prevalent in inner-city, low-income, minority schools, and helps to clarify what exactly is at stake in the symbolic and sometimes physical violence of schooling. Key to understanding the primary relation between camp and classroom is Agamben’s framework of the biopolitical, which paradoxically includes life as a political concern through its exclusion from the political sphere. Here Lewis appropriates Agamben’s terminology in order to theorize the biopedagogical, wherein educational life is included in schooling through its abandonment. For Lewis, the theory of the camp is necessary to recognizing how schools function and, in turn, how they could function differently.

Visions of Curriculum, Community, and Science.

Abstract: Although the natural sciences are dedicated to understanding the natural world, they are also dynamic and shaped by cultural values. The sciences and attendant technologies could be very responsive to a population that participates in and uses them responsibly. In this essay, Nancy Brickhouse and Julie Kittleson argue for re-visioning the sciences in ways that respond to diversity. By way of educational processes, the sciences might be reshaped to advance critical issues such as social justice and eco-justice. This vision of science and science education opens up new possibilities for what counts as scientific knowledge and what it means to participate in science. We envision schools where young people learn to engage in science in ways that lead to the development of the science we need. To disengage in science is to leave it in the hands of elites whose values may work against the possibility of an ecologically and socially just society.

Pushing the limits of liberalism: queerness, children, and the future

Abstract: In this essay, Cris Mayo describes a tension between recognizing gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender (lgbt) people by law and giving (or denying) them certain legal rights on the basis of identity, on the one hand, and enabling queer people, not always fully recognizable as inhabiting particular identity categories, to live their potentials, on the other. Laws and rights regulate particular kinds of people, and while lgbt people have pursued civil rights energetically for the last sixty years or so, their queerness continues to complicate their attempts to gain legitimacy. Beyond civil rights claims, queer liberationist claims push the limits of the understanding of identity, sexual practices, and political life, because they prompt us to consider not just abstract possibilities and freedoms but the freedoms and possibilities of people barely recognizable. Mayo shows how these queer claims are often hard to frame in terms of liberal theory and actual law.

Leisure, freedom, and liberal education

Abstract: At present liberal education is generally understood and justified as the acquisition of critical thinking skills and individual autonomy. Traditionally, however, the ultimate purpose of liberal education has been leisure. Freedom, it was thought, was not simply the result of critical thinking but also required the cultivation of leisure that involved a vigilant receptivity — a stillness from the busy world of work and the restive probing of a discursive mind. In this essay, Kevin Gary argues that the cultivation of leisure has been and ought to be an essential part of what constitutes a liberal education. Focused on interior freedom, leisure offers a valuable way of learning that ushers in an authentic freedom that a critical approach to learning and liberal education does not. Accordingly, it offers a valuable defense against the hegemonic world of work that defines and appraises one’s value exclusively in terms of one’s doing.

Adorno and the borders of experience: the significance of the nonidentical for a “different” theory of bildung

Abstract: In this essay Christiane Thompson discusses the systematic outcomes of Theodor Adorno's philosophical work for a reworked theory of Bildung (an important term in the German tradition of philosophy and history of education). In his essay “Theory of Halbbildung,” Adorno revealed the inevitable failure of Bildung, on the one hand, and the necessity of Bildung (in view of a critique of society), on the other. After having exposed this contradiction, Thompson seeks to analyze Bildung's systematic role by turning to Adorno's reflections on art and metaphysics. Adorno's concept of aesthetic experience hints at the possibility of a more genuine approach to Bildung and culture, one that makes the borders of our experience visible and, as a result, suggests a different relation to ourselves and to the world. She concludes by examining the critical dimensions of this different Bildung as well as its pedagogical relevance.

Before recognition, and after: the educational critique

Abstract: Social struggles that turn on race, gender, and sexuality are struggles for recognition. At least, this has been a widespread assumption for decades. Yet this assumption has come under critique of late. In this essay, Charles Bingham looks into the debate that surrounds the recognitive paradigm. He looks both at the general (noneducational) debate, and then at the more specific educational debate around recognition. He concludes by highlighting the practical contributions that educators bring to recognitive discourse. Such practical contributions are missing from the more general debate as it has been articulated by cultural theorists. Educational thought adds a significant, and particularly useful, dimension to discussions surrounding the recognitive assumption.

The 'Kingdom of God on Earth' and Early Chicago Pragmatism

Abstract: Pragmatism has been rediscovered in recent years and presented as emblematic of modern thinking. At the center of this worldwide interest in late-nineteenth century Pragmatism stood, first, a rejection of the traditional dualistic construction of the world in philosophy and psychology; second, a distinguishing of the findings of learning theory from those of evolutionary theory; and, third, a consideration of industrial democracy as the context of modern thinking and action. In this essay Daniel Trohler shows that these innovations were far less secular than has generally been assumed. Underlying early Chicago Pragmatism is a reformed (Calvinist) Protestant mentality that was shaped by a vision of a common mission: realizing the “kingdom of God on earth”— a mentality that responded critically to the provocations of modernity (specifically, industrialization and capitalism) and, through this response, developed a distinctive discourse that came to be called “Pragmatism.”

Race ignore‐ance, colortalk, and white complicity: white is…white isn’t1

Abstract: In this review essay, Barbara Applebaum uses white complicity as a framework for discussing three books: Mica Pollock’s Colormute: Race Talk Dilemmas in an American School, Debra Van Ausdale and Joe R. Feagin’s The First R: How Children Learn Race and Racist, and Virginia Lea and Judy Helfand’s Identifying Race and Transforming Whiteness in the Classroom. She explains the notion of white complicity and discusses some of the deep philosophical questions involving moral responsibility and agency that arise when one acknowledges white complicity. In particular, she examines the question of whether complicity is best described as grounded in individual intention or as an outcome of collective action, as well as whether “complicity” as a word displaces the strong sense of harm implied by the term “racist.” Finally, Applebaum explores how some of these philosophical questions crisscross through the discussions highlighted in the three books.

Toward a semiotic theory of choice and of learning

Abstract: In this essay, Andrew Stables and Stephen Gough explore some of the implications for educational policy and practice of a view of living (and, therefore, of learning) as semiotic engagement. Such a view, Stables and Gough argue, has the potential to displace or circumvent essentially Cartesian models currently dominant within learning theory (cognitivism and responses to it) and within neoclassical economics (rational choice and responses to it). It thus enables synergies between theories of learning and of economic behavior, allowing for greater consistency in thinking about (but not necessarily prescribing for) both educational policy and provision, on the one hand, and curriculum and pedagogy, on the other. In addition, the authors claim that giving semiotics a foundational role in educational thinking provides a basis for the broader development of liberal political thought within a postmodern cultural context.

''we are one big, happy family'': beyond negotiation and compulsory happiness

Abstract: Much recent scholarship on changing educational practices in Western families focuses on the idea that negotiation has become the dominant approach to family household management. In this essay, Bruno Vanobbergen, Michel Vandenbroeck, Rudi Roose, and Maria Bouverne-De Bie examine the idea of the negotiation model functioning as a directive. To illustrate this process, they demonstrate how the contemporary vocabulary about parental education affects the construction of parental beliefs and the concepts that define research. The authors first present a genealogy of negotiation by looking at construc- tions of childhood and parenthood, as well as the educational practices that shape, and are in turn shaped by, these constructions. They then turn their attention to the concept of the autonomous self and its im- plications for family relations and family household practices. In reviewing the literature on changing educational practices in Western fami- lies, one inevitably encounters the idea that we have transitioned toward a family household in which negotiation has become the dominant principle. The general thesis is that since the 1970s, the management style within family households has emphasized negotiation rather than command. Recently, historians of education have expressed doubts about the tenability of the negotiation hypothesis, pointing to the difficulty of configuring breaks within our Western history. In this article, we do not focus on the question of whether today's households are more embedded in a sphere of negotiation than yesterday's households. Our starting point lies rather in the idea of how the negotiation model functions as a directive. This direc- tive is not solely important in terms of the functioning of families, but in terms of how social structures in general operate.

Rules, technique, and practical knowledge: a wittgensteinian exploration of vocational learning

Abstract: In this essay, Christopher Winch explores the relevance of Ludwig Wittgenstein’s account of rule-following to vocational education with particular reference to the often-made claim that any account of an activity in terms of rule-following implies rigidity and inflexibility. He argues that most rule-following is only successful when it involves a degree of flexibility. For instance, most technical work that involves rule-following requires flexibility and situational awareness for success. Technical education that fails to take account of the need to apply rules in a way that accounts for a wide variety of situations is likely to be unsuccessful. Winch offers an account of professional judgment based on Stephen Toulmin’s theory of argumentation and discusses progression from novice to expert in terms of Toulmin’s analysis. He also considers the relation between vocational education and other practices in the context of the wider civic implications of occupational practice.

In a dimension of height: ethics in the education of others

Abstract: Ethics penetrates every aspect of Western education. Many of its dominant narratives — education as salvation, as progress, as panacea, and as liberation, for example — are infused with the ethical. Educators are compelled by ethical callings; in fact, education as the call of the ethical informs the singular and collective identities of educators. In this essay, Aparna Mishra Tarc troubles the role of the ethics in Western education using Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s deconstruction of the ethical in philosophy. Spivak’s deconstruction reveals how an ethics based in one’s idea of what the Other is and should be violates the uniqueness of Others. Spivak challenges educators to examine vigilantly the ethico-political assumptions and discourses underlying ethical acts in the classroom. Drawing on the writings of Emmanuel Levinas, mediated by the thinking of Jacques Derrida, Spivak re-imagines ethics apart from — and as a part of — its metaphysical heritage. Tarc discusses aspects of Spivak’s vision for an education borne out of ethical singularity as hearing and responding to the Other’s call. Finally, she explores its implications for how one might begin to respond justly to the conditions of others within and alongside of one’s own intellectual and pedagogical engagements.

The practice of higher education: in pursuit of excellence and of equity

Abstract: In this essay, David Bridges explores the notion of practice with particular application to the practice of higher education. He considers whether some of the changes in practices linked to the massification of higher education have in fact resulted in the breakdown of higher education as a practice, at least on Alasdair MacIntyre’s definition of the term. Specifically, Bridges examines whether higher education has lost its sense of the forms of human excellence around which its life is constructed. Finally, he points to issues of equity raised by the huge variety of forms that higher education now takes and asks whether this variety might mean that students are winning entry to some very different qualities of experience when judged against the requirement that they should contribute to the development of human excellence.

Simone de beauvoir: the philosophy of lived experience

Abstract: Simone de Beauvoir, best known outside France as a leading modern feminist theorist, is also recognized as a writer of literature, philosophy, and drama. In this essay, James D. Marshall aims to present Beauvoir, not as a mere entry in the history of French philosophy, nor as an under-laborer to Jean-Paul Sartre, but as someone who has important philosophical insights to contribute to ongoing debates on the human condition, including those concerned with education. Central to these debates are issues such as what does it mean to be an individual human being and what characterizes the relations between individuals and others and between individuals and society. Marshall argues that Beauvoir can participate in such philosophical and educational debates, for philosophy of education has major interests in such questions as who or what is this “person” whom we profess to be educating, what kind of person or outcome of education is desirable, and in what kind of society should these individuals take part?

Managerialism, fundamentalism, and the restructuring of faith‐based community schools

Abstract: In this essay, Chaya Herman explores the interaction between two powerful global dynamics that have affected educational institutions and society at large: one is neoliberalism, with its attendant notions of marketization and managerialism; the other is the resurgence of ethnic and religious, often fundamentalist, communities in the search for identity. The essay is based on a larger research project that explores the profound effects of the ideological and managerial restructuring process in Johannesburg’s Jewish community schools, the broader context for which has been South Africa’s transformation to democracy. Herman suggests that these two dynamics are synergetic forces and that their accumulated effect has the power to shift the discourse of the community toward ghettoization and toward the creation of a homogenous community founded on a narrowly defined common identity.