by David Hansen, Megan Laverty & Rory Varrato - 2020
The authors provide an overview of the special issue on reimaging research and practice at the crossroads of philosophy, teaching, and teacher education. They describe the purposes and the background of the research context out of which the issue arose, and they summarize the articles that comprise it.
by Cara Furman & Shannon Larsen - 2020
The authors deploy both qualitative data and philosophical argumentation to examine how an exercise, called "Interruptions," can help educators engage in thinking-in-action and, in turn, care for their ethical selves as persons responsible for the education of children and youth.
by María Paula Ghiso & Stephanie Burdick-Shepherd - 2020
The authors utilize the practice of philosophical meditation, as articulated in Pierre Hadot’s examination of philosophy as a way of life, to inquire into early childhood learning and teacher education, with particular attention to the discourses of improvement and accountability that have shaped current policies and reform efforts. The authors link this meditational focus with feminist and de-colonial theoretical perspectives to make visible the role of power in characterizations of children’s learning as related to norms of development, minoritized identities, and hierarchies of knowledge.
by Margaret Crocco - 2020
The author responds to several themes that emerge across the articles in the special issue, considering them in light of contexts of schooling, teacher education, and the contemporary historical moment in the United States. The articles raise salient concerns about what the reform movements of the last twenty or so years have meant for scholars, practitioners, and students who are involved in schooling and teacher preparation.
by Clarence Joldersma & Lisa Perhamus - 2020
Using an Ohio court case in which a single mother was convicted of stealing an education for crossing school district boundaries, this article uses Butler’s idea of precariousness, Arendt’s and Benjamin’s ideas of state violence, and Derrida’s idea of justice to come, to argue that the law creates unequal distribution of quality education. By distinguishing law from justice, it becomes clear that justice was not served in her case.
by Paul Eaton & Petra Hendry - 2019
This article provides an analysis of the dominant narratives of educational history in which curriculum has been constructed as a reductionist, linear input-output closed system of knowledge production. Drawing on Deleuze and Guatarri’s concept of assemblage the authors engage the new materialism to revision curriculum as an ontological endeavor of being~becoming.
by Wayne Journell - 2018
This article uses three commonly cited criteria for evaluating whether educators should frame marriage equality as controversial following the 2015 landmark ruling in Obergefell v. Hodges that legalized same-sex marriage in the United States.
by Douglas Yacek - 2018
This article investigates the ethical implications of the growing phenomenon of armed public school teachers.
by Sarah Stitzlein - 2018
This article challenges the recent shift toward teaching and measuring grit in schools by exposing its shortcomings and offering a more helpful and sustainable educational aim of pragmatist hope.
by Jennifer James, Jessica Kobe & Xiaoying Zhao - 2017
The authors explore the role of trust in children’s approaches to deliberative dialogue with their peers.
by James Stillwaggon - 2016
As Robert McClintock argues, educational researchers often rely upon a distributive model of justice, despite its insufficiency in describing education’s formative aims. In this essay, the author argues that the limits of our contemporary view of education as a distributable good can be traced to two distinct and contradictory traditions in educational thought: one, the distributive ideal of divine plenitude and the other, the formative principle that McClintock identifies in Plato’s Republic.
by Avi Mintz - 2016
Does Plato’s trailblazing discussion of common education in The Republic include all children or only those of the elite guardian class? The author proposes a new way of answering this question. He suggests that Plato’s ambiguous treatment of the third class’s education in The Republic may have been intentional, designed to provoke his readers to address this question.
by Robert McClintock - 2016
This paper introduces the human problem of acting justly; it discusses the work that concepts of justice perform in human action; it situates a concept of formative justice relative to other forms of justice (i.e., distributive, retributive, social); and it explores some implications formative justice can have for educational policy and practice.
by David Hansen - 2015
In this article, the author criticizes popular responses to the question of whether education is possible in the world today. He argues that the question of education needs to be kept open in order to ensure the continuation of education itself.
by Susana Muñoz, Michelle Espino & René Antrop-González - 2014
The authors draw from the historical aspects associated with the formation of Freedom Schools during the Civil Rights era and the concept of school as sanctuary to understand the pedagogical and philosophical underpinnings associated with the establishment of Freedom University. The findings demonstrate that Freedom University is a postsecondary space with characteristics resembling a sanctuary school by centering students’ experiences within the curriculum, using Civil Rights history to complicate contemporary anti-immigration sentiments, and enacting transformational resistance by both students and faculty. The authors suggest that, by creating sanctuaries of learning on a postsecondary level, students without documentation are afforded a space to continue their education for the sake of learning but not for a college degree.
by Hugh Sockett & Robert Boostrom - 2013
Putting the word moral in the title of this volume carries some risk, because moral is an unusually slippery as well as powerfully evocative word. For some, it is a grim and proper word, suggesting the constraint of a moralistic or rule-bound view of life, summed up in a narrow compendium of “thou shalt not’s.” For others, it is a sacred word that implies (as it did for many of the early supporters of the common school in the US) the necessary superiority of Christianity over any other view of life. For others, it is a nostalgic word, calling to mind a better day and bringing an invitation to lament the decline of civility or the corruption of the social order.
by Hugh Sockett - 2013
This chapter argues that schooling neglects virtue through the dominant quest for right answers. This is not only intellectually disreputable in presuming the correctness of what is taught, but it undermines the development of necessary intellectual virtues, such as open-mindedness, impartiality, and accuracy in the school curriculum, and it fails to create the intellectual and moral framework for the democratic citizen, specifically in the development of tolerance, social responsibility, and prudence. This neglect of virtue in schooling is primarily visible in the intellectual characteristics and attitudes of the college freshman.
by Matthew Sanger & Richard Osguthorpe - 2013
This chapter examines the gap between the widespread acknowledgment that teaching is a moral endeavor, on the one hand, and the lack of explicit, systematic teacher education research and practice to support preparing teachers for the moral aspects of teaching. After providing an initial description of the aforementioned gap, the chapter surveys the evidence that such a gap exists, then takes up a number of themes found in the literature bordering the gap. It concludes with a discussion of possible paths for teacher education research and practice to move forward.
by David Kennedy - 2013
This chapter contrasts the aims of progressive and traditional state-mandated schooling, and argues that the former represents a new form in the history of Western education, oriented to individual, social and moral reconstruction rather than reproduction, and guided by the evolutionary possibilities inherent in human neoteny. The school is identified as a key site for the reconstruction of civic virtue in its role as a “just community” or embryonic society grounded in the principles and practices of participatory democracy.
by David Carr - 2013
“Aesthetics” is often taken to be the study of art, but it has come to mean a variety of rather different things in contemporary educational theory and practice, such as: (i) sensory education; (ii) appreciation of beauty; (iii) education in appreciation of the arts. The danger of running these different senses together is explored and the main argument of this chapter is that the moral significance of the aesthetic dimension of works of art lies in its direct engagement with the affective or emotional aspects of moral development.
by Stephanie Burdick-Shepherd - 2013
This chapter looks at John Dewey’s consideration of childhood as a platform from which to view the significance of childhood in moral life. It argues that the concept of childhood is integral to our thinking in the teaching and learning relationship. When we consider childhood from Dewey’s platform, we see that childhood is relevant to society both because it is a source of continued renewal and growth for our society and because its plastic and imaginative grounding enables children and their childhoods to fundamentally change educational relationships.
by Barbara Stengel & Mary Casey - 2013
To teach for instrumental and innovative growth for both student and teacher is not simply a technical challenge. It is a moral task, requiring intimacy in the service of developing autonomy. It involves moral sensitivity and moral perception in prompting and framing responsible pedagogical action. It is an emotionally fraught enterprise, one that runs headlong into the human resistance to development and growth (Bion, 1994). What follows is an uncovering of this pedagogical responsibility. As we shall show, the way in to the moral dimensions of a teacher’s work is the same path that leads to academic effectiveness. Taking the moral seriously is not a diversion from the preparation and development of effective teachers, nor is it an added consideration; it is central to the very possibility of responsive and responsible education.
by Robert Boostrom - 2013
This chapter explores the basis of rationality, arguing that critical thinking tends to be taught in schools as a set of skills because of the failure to recognize that choosing to think critically depends on the prior development of stable sentiments or moral habits that nourish a rational self. Primary among these stable sentiments are the delight of recognition and the surprise of uncertainty. The creative act of imagination that sparks the delight of recognition is an invitation to begin rational enquiry. A flash of insight provides a motive for valuing the principle of truthfulness, which in turn provides a basis for a community of enquiry. While acknowledging that in the current climate of accountability-through-assessment there are good reasons for teachers to believe that the aim of nourishing the stable sentiments that support rationality is out of their reach, the chapter argues that students become independent rational reasoners only because they have lived in a community or classroom in which the surprise of uncertainty is valued more than a right answer, and the delight of recognition is more celebrated than a test score.
by Jim Garrison & A.G. Rud - 2013
The purpose of this chapter is to understand the spiritual dimensions of teaching by elucidating the cardinal and forgotten virtue of reverence. Reverence has a power beyond a typical understanding of it as something religious. Reverence involves a sense of wonder and awe for something or someone that meets at least one of the following conditions: (1) something we cannot control; (2) something we cannot create; (3) something we cannot fully understand; (4) something transcendent, even supernatural The chapter shows reverence in a wider context that does not diminish its spiritual connotations, but rather shows its importance and relevance to teaching in today’s classrooms.
by James Laspina - 2013
The chapter examines John Dewey’s concepts of society and the public in the context of digital technology and its potential to transform society and the moral ethos of the public school. I argue that Dewey’s theory of society and the public, though articulated for an industrial age, are, like his moral vision of social democracy and public education, still of perennial importance as a ethical lens to frame and critique the emerging network society and publics.
by David Hansen - 2013
In this chapter, the author proposes to imagine the aims of the school in light of a cosmopolitan philosophy of education. The first section that follows provides a summary account of what the author takes cosmopolitanism to mean. The second section frames a philosophy of education that stems from this account. The third and penultimate section sketches a conception of the school and its moral and ethical aims in light of this philosophy of education. The discussion will foreground normative ideals. Such ideals can be dangerous if they blind people to realities. They can be disappointing if failure to attain them weighs down hard on people. But if ideals are understood as sources of direction rather than as destinations, they can assist educators to sustain their course in the face of obstacles. The author’s core purpose here is to highlight why a cosmopolitan orientation can inspire, encourage, and help guide educators in realizing schools for our time.
by Elizabeth Campbell - 2013
This chapter presents a conceptual argument that positions two broad areas of educational scholarship—the moral and ethical dimensions of teaching and social justice education—as being quite separate, different, and ultimately antithetical, despite contemporary trends towards merging them in both theoretical and practical ways. It argues that an emerging tendency in social justice education to position its political agenda as a moral or ethical endeavor, especially within teacher education, is problematic in that it complicates, rather than enhances, the conceptualization of teaching as moral practice; it further distracts teachers and student teachers from fully engaging with the ethical aspects of their daily professional work.
by Robin Barrow - 2013
This paper endorses the overall argument of the preceding contributions. It argues for an approach to teacher education focused more strongly on the nature of the educational enterprise and the why, wherefore and how of teaching specific subjects. The importance of distinguishing between the provisional nature of knowledge claims and relativism is stressed, as is the distinction between the uncertain and the arbitrary.
by Philip Jackson - 2012
This article presents a critical analysis of Dewey’s two editions of How We Think.
by Thomas Fallace - 2011
This historical study traces the influence of John Dewey on the discourse of civic and social education during the formative years of the progressive education movement.
