Showing papers in "Studies in Philosophy and Education in 2017"

Democracy and Education: A Theoretical Proposal for the Analysis of Democratic Practices in Schools

Abstract: In the educational sphere, the concept of democracy is used in many and varied ways, though the hegemonic school culture often starts from a concept of democracy that is taken for granted, and it is understood that the entire educational community shares a similar concept. As a result of the research project “Democracy, participation and inclusive education in schools” (EDU2012-39556-C02-01/02) we realized that the above-mentioned concept is used without being accurately defined in the school setting. This observation is what has prompted us to write this article, basically structured in two parts. In the first part, based on the theoretical debate occurring in the field of social sciences, we delimit the concept of democracy and structure it in four basic dimensions: governance, inhabitance, otherness and ethos. In the second part, we specify and examine in depth these four dimensions in the school setting in order to construct a broad and transversal, yet specific, definition, with which to be able to develop ambitious democratic projects and, in turn, contribute to scientific debate.

The Contribution of Non-representational Theories in Education: Some Affective, Ethical and Political Implications

Abstract: This paper follows recent debates around theorizations of ‘affect’ and its distinction from ‘emotion’ in the context of non-representational theories (NRT) to exemplify how the ontologization of affects creates important openings of ethical and political potential in educators’ efforts to make productive interventions in pedagogical spaces. The ontological orientation provided by NRT has two important implications for educational theory and practice. First, it exposes the indeterminacy and inventiveness of affective capacities of bodies, illustrating how diverse socio-materials events are variously enrolled in everyday school life processes of differentiation. Second, it emphasizes an affirmative account of the ethics and politics of affect in which connections and relations forged between bodies, things and spaces constitute the basis of new configurations of affects and emotions in schools.

Transformative Learning, Enactivism, and Affectivity

Abstract: Education theorists have emphasized that transformative learning is not simply a matter of students gaining access to new knowledge and information, but instead centers upon personal transformation: it alters students’ perspectives, interpretations, and responses. How should learning that brings about this sort of self-transformation be understood from the perspectives of philosophy of mind and cognitive science? Jack Mezirow has described transformative learning primarily in terms of critical reflection, meta-cognitive reasoning, and the questioning of assumptions and beliefs. And within mainstream philosophy of mind, there has been a long-standing assumption that cognition and thought are brain-based, computational, disembodied processes that occur separately from emotion and affect. According to this view, selftransformation might be construed as the forging of new neural connections and the development of new cognitive “programs.” However, I will argue that the literature on embodiment and enactivism that has emerged in recent years offers us a different and more productive way to conceptualize the intended effects of transformative learning. From the standpoint of enactivism, the experience of transformative learning is thoroughly bound up with the cognitive shifts that it involves, and it also involves significant changes to the neurobiological dynamics of the living body. Moreover, personal transformation is not simply something that happens to subjects, but rather a process in which they are actively and dynamically engaged. In addition, this enactivist approach emphasizes that the learning process is fully embodied and fundamentally affective. From a phenomenological perspective, personal transformation can be understood as a pronounced alteration in cognitive-affective orientation; and from a neurobiological perspective, the development of new habits of mind can be understood as the formation of highly integrated patterns of bodily engagement and response. The upshot is that it is not just subjects’ brains that are altered over the course of transformative learning, but also their overall bodily and affective attunement to their surroundings.

Democratic Education in the Mode of Populism

Abstract: This paper seeks to bring John Dewey’s pragmatist philosophy of democratic education and the public into dialogue with Ernesto Laclau’s theory of populism. Recognizing populism as an integral aspect of democracy, rather than as its antithesis, the purpose of this paper is to provide a theoretical account of populism as being of educational relevance in two respects. First, it argues that the populist logic specifies a set of formal elements by which democratic education could operate as a collective enterprise. Second, it asserts that the notion of populism supplements any congenial understanding of democratic education by bringing political demands, conflicts and affects to the fore. Finally, the paper discusses the risks and possibilities inherent in visualizing populism as an educational modus.

Environmental Consciousness, Sustainability, and the Character of Philosophy of Education

Abstract: This paper argues that education itself, properly understood, is intimately concerned with an individual’s being in the world, and therefore is ineluctably environmental. This is guaranteed by the ecstatic nature of consciousness. Furthermore, it is argued that a central dimension of this environment with which ecstatic human consciousness is engaged, is that of nature understood as the ‘self-arising’. Nature, so conceived, is essentially other and is epistemologically mysterious, possessing its own normativity, agency, and intrinsic value. As such, engagement with nature presents opportunities for consciousness quintessentially to go beyond itself, to be inspired and refreshed, and to receive non-anthropogenic standards in the form of intimations of what is fitting and what is not. It will be argued that these are fundamental to the orientation of human being, providing primordial intimations of the nature of reality and truth. Given their centrality to the idea of a person’s becoming educated, the elucidation of these and the issues to which they give rise must be central to the philosophy of education and in this sense it becomes deeply ecological.

The Metabolic Core of Environmental Education

Abstract: I consider the case of the “simplest” living beings—bacteria—and examine how their embodied activity constitutes an organism/environment interaction, out of which emerges the possibility of learning from an environment. I suggest that this mutual co-emergence of organism and environment implies a panbiotic educational interaction that is at once the condition for, and achievement of, all living beings. Learning and being learned from are entangled in varied ways throughout the biosphere. Education is not an exclusively human project, it is part of the ancient evolutionary process of elaborating and diversifying the relational possibilities inherent in metabolism that has brought forth our diverse and flourishing world. Abstracted from context, “education” appears as a set of ways in which humans actively engage and take responsibility for the learning outcomes of relationships with each other. Insofar as we consider this distinction absolute rather than a performed construct to be assessed by its consequences, we blind ourselves to the educative dimension of other species as well as our many miseducative engagements with them. If learning processes are inherent and constitutive of ecological communities, education theorists should devote their pedagogical sensitivities and insights to the crucial challenge of developing educative sustainable human–nature relations.

Shut-Up and Listen: Implications and Possibilities of Albert Memmi’s Characteristics of Colonization Upon the “Natural World”

Abstract: This paper begins by exploring the anti-colonial work of Tunisian scholar Albert Memmi in his classic book The Colonizer and the Colonized and determining whether the characteristics of colonization that he names can be successfully applied to the current relationship between modern humans and the “natural world”. After considering what we found to be the five key characteristics: manufacturing the colonial, alienation and unknowability, violence, psychological strategies (bad faith), and language, history, and metaphor we draw clear parallels, through selected examples, to the exploitative relationships enacted in many realms of the modern human/nature relationship. In so doing the paper posits that the beings that comprise the “natural world” are colonized. It then continues from that position to explore the possibility of cultivating practices of listening to the voices of these colonized others to inform anti-colonial ecopedagogy as allies. We employ the term “shut-up” as an anti-colonial gesture to remind ourselves as much as others of the importance of first listening to the colonized other before engaging in “post-colonial” theorizing about prospective relationships or liberatory solutions “for” them. Given the fast-paced and cacophonic urban life many humans increasingly inhabit, and the disciplined and reiterative practice(s) required to learn to listen to other voices, we suggest caution and care when importing postcolonial theory into “environmental” contexts and seek to instigate further discussion as to how we might enact solidarity with other beings as anti-colonial allies in education. To this end, we conclude the paper with some educational implications based on research at a place-based school and focus on the role history, language and metaphor play in manufacturing a colonial relationship, but also provide a potential means for changing relationships with the diverse beings with whom we share the planet.

Transformative Critique: What Confucianism Can Contribute to Contemporary Education.

Abstract: Critical thinking is currently much celebrated in the contemporary West and beyond, not least in higher education. Tertiary education students are generally expected to adopt a critical attitude in order to become responsible and constructive participants in the development of modern democratic society. Currently, the perceived desirability of critical thinking has even made it into a seemingly successful marketable commodity. A brief online search yields a vast number of books that are mostly presented as self-help manuals to enable readers to enhance their critical abilities. But how should critical thinking be taught? Is it at all possible? Instead of attempting to provide a direct answer to this pressing question, this paper seeks inspiration in a culturally rather remote philosophy of education that hitherto has not been regarded as a stimulant for critical thinking, namely the ancient philosophy of Confucianism. The paper argues that not only are most if not all types of thinking regarded in the West as ‘critical’ also present in Confucianism, but also that the Confucian philosophy presides over a particular type which increasingly tends to be neglected in the contemporary West; a type that I call ‘transformative self-critical attitude’. Through a comparison with the well-known Teaching Perspectives Inventory in higher education, the transformative self-critical attitude is used to elucidate some further aspects of the Confucian philosophy of education that may offer valuable insights to contemporary educators.

Why Bother Teaching? Despairing the Ethical Through Teaching that Does Not Follow

Abstract: Contemporary education policy discourse in the United States views teaching as the primary instrument to effect student achievement, and teachers are responding by leaving the profession and discouraging students from becoming teachers. While teaching is more commonly associated with hope, I argue that the growing dissatisfaction of teachers with their profession can be understood through despair as an ethical act. Rather than disavow the role of despair in teaching and education more broadly, the critical and provocative roles of despair are emphasised here as an ethical response to a normative order of effective teaching. These roles are expressed through the question of why bother. Understanding why bother teaching as an ethical question that arises from despair serves to critique the present and provoke movement without yet projecting a future. Thus, this paper traces the ways the ethical negates a normative order to arrive at a teaching that does not follow from instrumental logic in service of a future goal, aim, or objective. This leads to a consideration of the risks involved in despairing the ethical, which I describe as a practice for which risk cannot be managed or minimised while remaining ethical.

From Human–Nature to Cultureplace in Education Via an Exploration of Unity and Relation in the Work of Peirce and Dewey

Abstract: In outdoor education discourse the notion of relation is often employed to convey basic connections between humanity and nature as human–nature relationships, yet the sense of relation itself is rarely questioned. Drawing on the work of Peirce and Dewey, I explore the ramifications of a more nuanced understanding of relation, specifically how relation works with and within differing senses of unity. These ramifications have consequences for how we understand human–nature relationships, which I argue are better conveyed in terms of culture–place. The various forms of unity described by Peirce inform more nuanced understandings of culture–place as cultureplace, with implications for the notion of transculturality. My specific concern with outdoor education then enables me to show how cultureplace and culture–place may be considered to have relevance pedagogically, especially in relation to dealing with cultural and environmental crises.

Cassandra in the Classroom: Teaching and Moral Madness.

Abstract: Moral madness is a symptom of the moral violence experienced by teachers who are expected to exercise responsibility for their students and their work, but whose moral voice is misrecognized as self-interest and whose moral agency is suppressed. I conduct a feminist ethical analysis of the figure of Cassandra to examine the ways in which teachers may be driven to moral madness.

A Spinozistic Model of Moral Education

Abstract: Spinoza’s claim that self-preservation is the foundation of virtue makes for the point of departure of this philosophical investigation into what a Spinozistic model of moral education might look like. It is argued that Spinoza’s metaphysics places constraints on moral education insofar as an educational account would be affected by Spinoza’s denial of the objectivity of moral knowledge, his denial of the existence of free will, and of moral responsibility. This article discusses these challenges in some detail, seeking to construe a credible account of moral education based on the insight that self-preservation is not at odds with benevolence, but that the self-preservation of the teacher is instead conditioned by the intellectual deliberation of the students. However, it is also concluded that while benevolence retains an important place in Spinoza’s ethics, his causal determinism poses a severe threat to a convincing account of moral education insofar as moral education is commonly understood to involve an effort to influence the actions of students relative to some desirable goal.

Neoliberal Education for Work Versus Liberal Education for Leisure

Abstract: My concern in this essay is not so much with the invisible work or hidden labor produced by neoliberalism, but rather with what Joseph Pieper describes as an emerging culture of “total work” (Pieper, p 43) More than the sheer (and increasing) number of hours of work, Pieper diagnoses a transformation in the way we view work Work (or the necessary tasks of production and consumption) has become the exclusive point of reference for how we see and define ourselves We are, Pieper feared, increasingly incapable of seeing beyond the working self The human being (or homo sapien) has become the human worker (or homo faber) Historically, the ideal of leisure offered a counter vision (and its practices a counterbalance) to this tendency Michael Oakeshott notes that while human beings must attend to the necessities for survival, they are most especially distinguished (from other animals) by their capacity for leisure—by an ability to pursue questions, conversations, and explorations that transcend the realm of production and consumption (Oakeshott 1989) To overlook and exclude leisurely pursuits is to diminish our humanity

Learning to Live in the Anthropocene: Our Children and Ourselves

Abstract: This essay responds to recent philosophical interest in the Anthropocene by asking (Trachtenberg in Inhabiting the Anthropocene: how we live changes everything, 2016): Can and should educators adopt, form, transmit, teach ways of living to maintain, if not enhance Earth’s habitability, especially its habitability for diverse children? This inquiry therefore calls for conceptual study of learning to live through the Anthropocene—with, despite, after, before, amid, among, away from, and against its myriad harms, possible and actual, especially its harms to children. Examining cases of environmental racism in Checker’s Polluted Promises (2005), and other cases of environmental threats to children’s health, in Steingraber’s Raising Elijah (2011), this study begins by proposing the ecological gap in philosophy of education consequential for children resides within another epistemological gap, variously designated gender gap, love gap, care gap (Martin in The schoolhome: rethinking schools for changing families. Harvard University Press, Cambridge, 1992; Education reconfigured: culture, encounter, and change. Routledge, New York, 2011; Warren in Ecofeminist philosophy: a Western persepctive on what it is and why it matters. Rowman & Littlefield, Lanham, 2000). Ruddick’s maternal thinking (1984, 1988) provides a conceptual frame for theorizing three moral aims of learning to live in the Anthropocene that might inform public schooling.

The Cartesian Heritage of Bloom’s Taxonomy

Abstract: This essay seeks to contribute to the critical reception of Bloom’s Taxonomy of Educational Objectives by tracing the Taxonomy’s underlying philosophical assumptions. Identifying Bloom’s work as consistent with the legacy of Cartesian thought, I argue that its hierarchy of behavioral objectives provides a framework for certainty and communicability in ascertaining student learning. However, its implicit rejection of intuitive knowledge as well as its antagonism between the human subject and the known object promote the Enlightenment ideal of education as “intellectual work.” When embodied in the Taxonomy, Cartesian assumptions foster a fundamental disposition in front of reality that is ultimately alienating. The paper begins with an explication of the Taxonomy’s affordances and philosophical assumptions. I then identify the Cartesian elements of these assumptions, particularly the Taxonomy’s inherent mind–body dualism and primacy of method. Finally, the paper employs these elements as an explanatory factor for the predominant critiques of the Taxonomy in educational theory literature. An addendum questions the possibility or plausibility of distance from objectives frameworks in the contemporary classroom.

The Problem of Bildung and the Basic Structure of Bildungstheorie

Abstract: In this article, an attempt is made to introduce a systematization of the loosely connected group of authors called Bildungstheorie. This ought to not only be of significance for German-speaking educational science, for the concept of Bildung is also increasingly used internationally for the formulation and development of pedagogical issues. It is proposed that the concept of complexity could be suitable for bringing attention to common presuppositions in the theoretical dealing with the problem of Bildung. The thesis is that Bildung in theories of Bildung is described from various perspectives as complex, meaning it is an open and uncertain interplay of components irreducibly associated with planning and governance problems. As this thesis is corroborated by means of selected positions within Bildungstheorie, evidence is provided that complexity in educational science—differently than it may seem at first glance—is not for the first time today a theme of importance. Rather, it is demonstrated that a nascent discipline-specific complexity research can be linked to already existing traditions.

Adorno: cultural education and resistance

Abstract: In recent years, culture has become significantly politicized, or conspicuously de-politicized, in different parts of the UK, making its appearance in education policy of pivotal interest and ripe for critical attention. From the vantage point of Theodor Adorno’s work on the culture industry and his writings on the work of the teacher, I argue that cultural education is a site where something crucial and distinctive takes place. Within the Enlightenment tradition, critical self-reflection and resistance to heteronymous ways of thinking are core aims of education. Adorno’s contribution to an understanding of these aims leads us to consider the importance of ‘live contact with the warmth of things’ as essential to ethical and intellectual life. The kindly tolerance of the pluralist ideal is now being teased and goaded by acts of terror and widespread concern about personal and social security. At such an unstable juncture, an understanding of cultural education as an experience of ‘incorrigible plurality’ enriches and informs the beleaguered ideal of pluralism and points a way forward in troubled times.

Civic Republicanism and Education: Democracy and Social Justice in School

Abstract: The republican political tradition, which originated in Ancient Rome and picked up by several early-modern thinkers, has been revived in the last couple of decades following the seminal works of historian Quentin Skinner and political theorist Philip Pettit. Although educational questions do not normally occupy the center stage in republican theory, various theorists working within this framework have already highlighted the significance of education for any functioning republic. Looking at educational questions through the lens of freedom as non-domination has already yielded important insights to discussions of political education. However, consideration of the existing republican educational discourse in light of the wide range of issues discussed in Pettit’s recent works reveals that it suffers from two major lacunae. First, it does not take into consideration the distinction (and deep connection) between democracy and social justice that has become central to Pettit’s republicanism. Thus, the current discussion focuses almost exclusively on education for democratic citizenship and hardly touches upon social justice. Second, the current literature thinks mainly in terms of educating future citizens, rather than conceiving of students also as political agents in the present, and of school itself as a site of non-domination. This paper aims at filling these voids, and it will therefore be oriented along two intersecting axes: the one between democracy and justice, and the other between future citizenship in the state and present citizenship at school. The resulting four categories will organize the discussion: future citizens and democracy; future citizens and social justice; present citizens and democracy; present citizens and social justice. This will not only enable us to draw a clearer line between the civic republican and liberal educational theories, but also make civic republican education a viable alternative to current educational approaches.

Monstrous Generosity: Pedagogical Affirmations of the “Improper”

Abstract: This article focuses upon monstrously generous teaching styles, enacted in neocolonial educational contexts, where the interactions between students and teachers are sometimes tense and mistrustful. The tensions between students and teachers are explained by discussing the ways in which schools—in the theoretical perspective of Roberto Esposito—operate to immunize the society against youth deemed improper. Utilizing the theories of Antonio Negri, James Baldwin, and W.E.B. Du Bois, the characterization of students as monstrous is discussed and an inversion is suggested, whereby students deemed to be monstrous are considered the source of reinvigorating visions of society. The pedagogical approaches of teachers who seek to welcome and nurture monstrous students are described, relying upon the accounts of great teachers offered by educators and sociologists. In practice, monstrously generous teachers make supererogatory gestures in their interactions with students, as a way of signaling to heavily-armored youth that they are willing to enter reciprocal relationships with them. Once youth drop their armor and begin to share their perspectives, monstrously generous teachers develop multiple means of helping youth develop their worldviews, without surveillance or censor.

Choices or Rights? Charter Schools and the Politics of Choice-Based Education Policy Reform

Abstract: Simply put, charter schools have not lived up to their advocates’ promise of equity. Using examples of tangible civil rights gains of the twentieth century (e.g. Brown v. Board, Lau v. Nichols) and extending feminist theories of invisible labor to include the labor of democracy, the authors argue that the charter movement renders invisible the labor that secured civil protections for historically marginalized groups. The charter movement hangs a quality public education—previously recognized as a universal guarantee—on the education consumer’s ability to navigate a marketplace. The authors conclude that the neoliberal agenda of positioning choice as the best mechanism for securing an education rolls back the rights that were already secured through the labor of democracy.

Should Children Have Best Friends

Abstract: An important theme in the philosophy of education community in recent years has been the way in which philosophy can be brought to illuminate and evaluate research findings from the landscape of policy and practice. Undoubtedly, some of these practices can be based on spurious evidence, yet have mostly been left unchallenged in both philosophical and educational circles. One of the newer practices creeping into schools is that of ‘No best friend’ policies. In some schools, this is interpreted as suggesting that children should not have just one best friend but a group of good friends. In others, it is interpreted as suggesting that children should forgo having best friends altogether and be friends with everyone. What is common to both is that friendship is seen as somehow ‘dangerous’. This article offers a preliminary examination of what has been referred to as this ‘dark side’ of friendship. Whilst philosophers such as Patricia White have previously alluded to its existence, there has been little philosophical scrutiny in any broad terms elsewhere. I examine three common arguments commonly used to justify ‘No best friends’ practices: that children can be friends with everyone; that young children are developmentally incapable of ‘real’ friendship hence best friendship should be avoided until later age; that only good people can be good friends. I indicate why this unreflective adoption of practices matters so much and why we should be prepared to challenge these cases. I identify practices that we have good evidence to support as making a positive difference in this area.

What Can Be Known and How People Grow: The Philosophical Stakes of the Assessment Debate

Abstract: Fierce debates over standardized assessments in teacher preparation have revolved around flaws in implementation and the politics of privatization. While important, this focus obscures the philosophical divide between proponents and opponents of standardized assessments. This article examines how faculty in New York State argue for and against a controversial performance assessment for teacher candidates, the edTPA. Revealing the distinctive ways that teacher educators on opposing sides of this debate understand the nature of knowledge, human development, professionalism, and social justice clarifies what is at stake in debates over how to prepare teachers. Such clarification can deepen the discussion on how to evaluate learning and growth as well as enrich the conversation on how to protect the integrity of educational professions and practices.

Parental Involvement and Public Schools: Disappearing Mothers in Labor and Politics.

Abstract: In this article, I argue that the material and rhetorical connection between “parental involvement” and motherhood has the effect of making two important features of parental involvement disappear. Both of these features need to be taken into account to think through the positive and negative effects of parental involvement in public schooling. First, parental involvement is labor. In the following section of this paper, I discuss the work of feminist scholars who have brought this to light. Second, parental involvement remains one of the most significant ways in which citizens participate in the public sphere. While education reform projects centered on parental involvement do show some recognition that what parents/mothers do is in fact work, even as they ignore the gendered dimensions of this work and sunnily demand that parents do ever more of it, these projects resist the recognition that parents’/mothers’ involvement is also political.

Anarchism, Schooling, and Democratic Sensibility

Abstract: This paper seeks to address the question of schooling for democracy by, first, identifying at least one form of social character, dependent, after Marcuse, on the historical emergence of a “new sensibility.” It then explores one pedagogical thread related to the emergence of this form of subjectivity over the course of the last two centuries in the west, and traces its influence in the educational counter-tradition associated with philosophical anarchism, which is based on principles of dialogue and social reconstruction as opposed to monologue and reproduction. The idea of a dialogical school has been made possible by a historical shift in adult views of child as interlocutor rather than “othered” object of adult formation—a shift that can be observed in an historical process of “closer approaches” between adult and child and a recognition of childhood and adulthood as forms of subjectivity that lie on a synchronous rather than a diachronic lifespan continuum. Finally the author identifies an archetype of “school” understood as a specific type of intentional community—an experimental zone in which participants are allowed and encouraged, through explicitly dialogical practice, to develop the personal and relational habits that make authentic democracy possible—a communal form that gives practical meaning to Dewey’s notion of school as “embryonic society”: a utopian space where natality is recognized as a fundamental cultural force, and where the evolutionary possibilities inherent in neoteny are taken as normative.

White Paper Concerning Philosophy of Education and Environment

Abstract: This paper begins with a recognition that questions of climate change, environmental degradation, and our relations to the natural world are increasingly significant and requiring of a response not only as philosophers of education but also as citizens of the planet. As such the paper explores five of the key journals in philosophy of education in order to identify the extent, range, and content of current discussions related to the environment. It then organizes and summaries the articles that were located while seeking to identify the extent, possibilities, and limitations of current discussions relating to the environment in the philosophy of education community. The hope is that ultimately this work is an invitation to anyone, regardless of tradition, orientation, and expertise, to contribute to the expansion and deepening of both theory and practice in the face of this most serious of challenges.

An Approach to Simone Weil’s Philosophy of Education Through the Notion of Reading

Abstract: This paper introduces Simone Weil’s notion of reading and some of its implications to education. Weil’s philosophy, in particular her notion of attention has caught interest of some education scholars; however, the existing studies are still underdeveloped. Introducing Weil’s notion of reading, which has not been studied almost at all by educationists but its significance is well-recognized by Weil scholars, I intend to set forth a more nuanced understanding of Weil’s attention that is necessary to further discuss Weil’s potential contribution to education research. Attention to other people, hence love of others, is reframed as “reading better.” We read better not simply by purifying our reading through detachment and self-negation, which is how the notion of attention is often understood and thus found problematic, but by incorporating multiple perspectives (readings) and finding balance among them. Learning to read better, then, is not merely inward effort of detachment done through introspection, but it also necessarily involves outward effort of working with other people and the world. It is through interacting with others, we may learn our own readings, recognize others’ readings, and seeking for just balance among them. This latter element which has been greatly dismissed is indispensable for any serious discussions of Weil’s philosophy in education.

The Eclipse of Imagination Within Educational ‘Official’ Framework and Why It Should be Returned to Educational Discourse: A Deweyan Perspective

Abstract: In recent decades, the shift towards the “learnification” of educational discourse has de facto reframed educational purposes and schooling practice, thus reframing what students should know, strive for, and, in a sense, be. In this paper, given the efforts to disrupt the dominance of learning discourse, I seek to engage regarding a specific concern, namely, the progressive removal of imagination within educational official framework. Indeed, imagination has virtually disappeared from the documents, publications, web pages and recommendations of major educational agencies and institutions worldwide, with important and potentially damaging consequences for schooling, teaching and learning. Employing a Deweyan perspective, I argue that imagination plays a crucial role in the creation of pivotal educational features and phenomena, such as knowledge, inquiry, choice and deliberation, critical agency, meaning creation, and, importantly, the openness of possibilities. Therefore, the eclipse of imagination becomes, at the very same time, the eclipse of education; nurturing imagination is about nurturing education.

The ‘Crucified’ Leader: Cynicism, Fantasies and Paradoxes in Education

Abstract: In this paper we argue that transnational as well as national political demands and expectations on the educational field are contributing to (re)produce four ideological-based educational leadership discourses in the literature. In order to conceptualize these discourses, we turn to the work of Schmidt (Diagnosis I—Filosoferende eksperimenter. Aarhus University Press, Aarhus, 1999, On respect. Aarhus University Press, Aarhus, 2011) and Zizek (Mapping ideology. Verso, New York, 2000, The sublime object of ideology. Verso, New York, 2008a). On that basis we identify four dominant educational leadership discourses: (a) a personhood-based discourse, (b) a profession-based discourse, (c) a standard-based discourse, and (d) a resource-based discourse. These discourses have—as we will show—various consequences for the way we think and talk about education and educational leadership in our age. Using examples that stem from a project about educational leadership in Danish upper secondary school, we will illustrate how educational leaders’ beings and doings are ‘regulated’ by these discourses, which place them in a tension field where different and conflicting (ideological) fantasies seem to be played out. Then, we will discuss how these fantasies can be challenged and how we can think and speak more intellectually about education and educational leadership. By using the term intellectual we are referring to educational leaders’ ability as human beings to critically reflect on their contemporary doings and beings within and beyond the existing social order. Hopefully this can help them (and us) to establish new ways for discussing not only what educational leadership is and should be about, but also what it could be about.