In the current educational climate, it is not surprising for teachers to experience apathy or to disengage politically. This essay examines the ways that educators can confront climates of constraint in an effort to engage and act. By highlighting the work of a variety of educators in Indianapolis, Indiana, the authors encourage educators to identify those ideas they hold up or onto as they debunk the myth of neutrality and move toward engagement and activism.

The Politics of Education: Culture, Power, and Liberation.

Avoiding Neutrality in Climates of Constraint: Moving from Apathy to Action.

At first glance there seems much in common between Marxism and popular education in Latin America. Both are theoretical constructs for analyzing and changing the world; both are concerned with the welfare of the oppressed; both relate to organizations or movements of people, as well as to sociopolitical theory. But drawing too close an association between the two is problematic. Marxists often criticize popular educators and vice-versa, and the different currents, tendencies, interpretations, and expressions of both Marxism and popular education inhibit simple comparisons.

Marxism and Popular Education in Latin America

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Ethical becoming: adult ethical development

This article expands a project begun as a participant in the first American Academy of Religion and Lilly Endowment Teaching Workshop on Religion. The original project examined feminist teaching methodologies and how a male theology professor could use these methodologies in a general undergraduate theology classroom. This work describes the processes of feminist and personalist teaching methodologies and analyzes their impact on undergraduate theology classrooms. While these approaches help students come to a greater sense of participation in and ownership of their knowledge, there has also been the attending risk that such pedagogies seemingly involve the student too intensely, too personally, and the course becomes a form of therapy. This study examines how this therapeutic turn appears to develop. It concludes with a discussion about the need for clearly articulated teaching methodologies and how their use where appropriate helps us anticipate and respond to therapeutic classroom dynamics.

Hazards of the Therapeutic: On the Use of Personalist and Feminist Teaching Methodologies

By including peace courses in graduate programs and essentializing criticality, nonviolence, and wholistic views, as represented by Paulo Freire, Mahatma Gandhi, and Thich Naht Hanh, respectively, adult education can promote a more peaceful society and include peace education as a subfield. Like the violent twentieth century, the beginning of the twenty-first is also imbued with violence. The 9/11 tragedy sparked violence in Afghanistan and Iraq. We seem to have achieved unprecedented civilization, but such an achievement is more material than spiritual. Countries with advanced weapons have become ruthless in dealing with conflicts, falsely secure in the knowledge of their material advantage. Education may not be a panacea, but it is still one of the basic long-term roads to achieving peace. Historically, adult education arose to respond to social needs by inducing both individual and social change; many adult educators recognize these social roots (Adult Learning, 1991; Adults Learning, 2003). Even though critical adult educators traditionally address social justice, components of peace, they seldom directly discuss the concept of peace and its implications for adult education. To raise the awareness of peace in adult education, its graduate programs should include peace courses to prepare adult educators to integrate peace components into their practice. To explore the essential elements of adult peace education, this study examines three theorists, Paulo Freire, Mahatma Gandhi, and Thich Nhat Hanh, representatives of the critical, nonviolent, and wholistic elements identified as necessary in preliminary literature reviews. The examination focuses on four research questions: how they view reality and human potential; how they view distortions of the human condition; what methods they promote for achieving peace; and what their views imply for adult peace education. Theoretical Foundation The philosophical hermeneutics of Hans-Georg Gadamer (1900-2002) investigates the phenomena of understanding, interpretation, historicality, linguisticality, hermeneutical circles, and conversational question/answer dialetics. For Gadamer, understanding and interpretation are our basic cognitive activities, not methodological techniques but “the original character of the being of human life itself” and “the basic structure of our experience of life” (1975, p. 230; 1984, p. 58). Understanding is the fusion of horizons (visions) of the text and the reader. The horizon, constructed by prestructures, accumulative experiences and tradition, is meant to be fluid, constantly shifting and changing, as it is challenged, invited, and reshaped by the differences between text and reader (1975). Through recognition of paradox and conflict, the two dissolve paradox and move beyond difference (He, 2002). On the other hand, interpretation is not an act “subsequent to understanding” but always a part of understanding (Gadamer, 1975, p. 274). In our “seeing, hearing, receiving,” and extracting meaning from something, we interpret it (Gadamer, 1984, p. 59). Hence “interpretation is the explicit form of understanding” (Gadamer, 1975, p. 274). Interpretation does not duplicate the original meaning of the text but emphasize the meaning of the text for the reader/interpreter and recognize the interpreter as a product of history, his or her understanding and interpretation bound by historicality, inherited and lived Learning In Community: Proceedings of the joint international conference of the Adult Education Research Conference (AERC) (48th National Conference) and the Canadian Association for the Study of Adult Education (CASAE)/l'Association Canadienne pour l'Etude de l'Education des Adultes (ACEEA) (26th National Conference). Edited by Laura Servage and Tara Fenwick (June 2007)

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The Politics of Education: Culture, Power, and Liberation.

Citations

Avoiding Neutrality in Climates of Constraint: Moving from Apathy to Action.

Marxism and Popular Education in Latin America

Ethical becoming: adult ethical development

Hazards of the Therapeutic: On the Use of Personalist and Feminist Teaching Methodologies

A Hermeneutical Study of the Essentialities of Adult Peace Education

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