Studies in Philosophy and Education最新文献

This paper explores sensory perception in classrooms, and the relationship between classrooms and nature in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic. First, it argues that this crisis provides a unique opportunity to rethink how we perceive classrooms and their connection with nature. Second, the paper describes what students and teachers usually see, hear, touch, smell, and taste in classrooms, and identifies unusual or overlooked sensory phenomena that COVID-19 has brought to our attention. Third, the paper discusses three types of classrooms (traditional, innovative learning environment, open-air) and how they model our perception and conceptualization of nature. The paper concludes by emphasizing the relevance of everyday aesthetics in education, what stands as an opportunity to sensorially enrich pedagogy, and to approach classrooms as proper dwellings for both humans and other-than-human beings.

This study takes up Paul Gilroy’s recent call to take seriously the political problem of fascism in the contemporary conjuncture as an educational problem. Specifically, the study will begin with analytic work to identify a set of guideposts that delineate the political logics of fascism. It will then examine the still under-developed theoretical work examining the political problem of contemporary fascism as an educational problem. And, it will attempt to advance this necessary work by tracing the outline of an antifascist educational project. It will be argued that an anti-fascist educational project must, in the short-term, develop polemical strategies that articulate a new set of political logics to challenge the increasingly cemented fascist logics at work today and, in the long-term, advance structural changes to educational institutions organized around normative aims of humane and humanizing education, morality and responsibility, and sociological knowledge.

Long portrayed as a virtuous profession, teaching has always been embedded in notions of trust and trustworthiness. Alongside expectations of epistemic cultivation and development, is an implicit handing over of discretionary powers to ‘the trusted teacher’. At the height of #blacklivesmatter protests in 2020, however, high school learners all over South Africa took to social media—@yousilenceweamplify—to express their hurt and anger at their dehumanising experiences at some of the country’s leading schools. Their accounts not only exposed some schools as intense sites of racial, religious, cultural, ethnic, and linguistic tension and conflict, but shattered presumptions about ‘the trusted teacher’. Following a consideration of what trust infers, and the potential harms that arise from epistemic mistrust, the paper considers what might be gained from philosophical engagements in the espousal of teaching as a relationship of epistemic trust, and which ensures the flourishing of both learner and teacher? How might philosophy of education assist teacher education programmes in attuning students to an understanding that being trustworthy as teachers resides in self-knowledge as well as knowledge of the differences of, and among others?

Calvino’s reflection on quickness brings the reader through a zig-zag journey without a predefined destination, crossing the history of literature in order to think about writing and the relationship between physical speed and speed of mind. To discuss quickness as a virtue, Calvino refers to the potentiality of human reasoning and typifies different styles of thought. Elaborating on quickness as a quality and a virtue in the contemporary societal and more particularly educational context which is conceptualized as “accelerated time” (Rosa Social Acceleration: A New Theory of Modernity, 2013) and “network time” (Hassan Time & Society 12:226–241, 2003) might at first glance seem somewhat irrelevant. However, the pressing relevance of this virtue lies precisely in the digitized direction which school education is faced with. The shift towards digital school education bears the implication of decoupling the space and time of education from the here and now of the classroom. This, on the flip side means allowing global events as well as personal happenings of the teacher and students to enter the classroom, leading the lesson time to become a poly-synchronous time. That is against this contemporary background of digital education that this article attempts to relate to Calvino’s understanding of quickness. The article embarks on characterizing four aspects of Calvino’s reading of quickness and problematizes their manifestation in the current digital school education climate and finally, it seeks to open some concrete horizons for re-introducing quickness as a virtue for education in the digital age.

This article discusses the place of thematic coherence in various approaches to educational dialogue and proposes a unifying approach to the analysis of thematic coherence of classroom conversations based on research in educational dialogue, philosophy of language and recent advances in linguistic research on discourse structure. Addressing the same main question is crucial to preserving thematic coherence in a conversation and is considered a key criterion of quality in classroom dialogues across the field of research in dialogic teaching, e.g., in Alexander’s Dialogic Teaching, Michaels and colleagues’ Accountable Talk, and Mercer’s Interthinking. Nonetheless, a shared definition of thematic coherence is missing in the field. In order to provide such a conception, we propose a question centered approach to evaluating the thematic coherence of educational discourse. On this proposal, the thematic coherence of a conversation depends on how a conversational contribution relates to a conversation’s overall question under discussion. We show how this approach may be used to examine thematic coherence and incoherence and argue that the proposal’s focus on utterance level features of discourse has an advantage in helping researchers track how specific linguistic features of dialogue shape classroom conversations.

Two recent lines of inquiry that have emerged in educational philosophy and research are the turn to affect theory and the call for decolonising education. Although there have been some efforts to bring these two lines of inquiry together and inform educational philosophy and research, there is still important conceptual work to be done, especially in the context of peace education, our focus in this paper. To initiate this work, we consider the concepts of affective atmospheres and atmospheric attunements that have been discussed within the context of affect theory. Drawing on these two concepts, we argue that fundamental to any attempts to decolonising peace education is elucidating the coloniality of affects. This is a necessary step towards dismantling the colonial affects that permeate peace education praxis and are maintained through perceptions of peace and conflict embedded within a Western, Eurocentric frame. The paper analyses the theoretical insights emerging from bringing these concepts together to bear on the decolonisation of peace education and discusses some political possibilities that are also enabled.

Much educational utopianism revolves around the “real versus blueprint utopia” dichotomy and the prescriptive normativity that utopian education involves. In this paper, I suggest that the “real and blueprint” distinction should not be dichotomized and that a richer set of normativities, apart from prescription, should operate in educational utopias. Ethico-politically and educationally, it is crucial to have affirmative rather than incriminatory utopias, regardless of their being real or blueprint. To argue this out, first I introduce the concepts of incriminatory and affirmative utopianism. Next, I sketch the educational-theoretical setting and discuss the current reliance on the “real versus blueprint utopia” dichotomy. Then I use the conceptual tool of incriminatory utopianism to show that risks of totalitarianism threaten all visions (even liberal anti-utopian ones) and not only blueprint utopianism. Therefore, we need not dichotomize real and blueprint utopias and embrace the former unconditionally. I conclude with some illustrations of why utopian thought involves multiple normativities rather than prescriptivism alone.

This paper seeks to initiate a theory of “imaginative dialogues” by articulating four dialogical principles that enable such a dialogue to occur. It is part of a larger project that takes the Socratic dialogue, a widely utilized conversation technique in philosophy education, as a starting point and aims to reinterpret it by shifting emphasis to the pre-reflective, pre-linguistic, and multimodal aspects of dialogues, involving both their verbal and embodied dimensions. To integrate the verbal dimensions of a dialogue with its more elusive embodied dimensions, the paper will examine the notion ‘dialogue’ from the perspective of two different strategies. The first strategy chiefly focuses on the dialogic encounter. The ‘in-between’ of this dialogic encounter enables something to emerge that transcends the individual perspective of the speakers involved. The second strategy is primarily concerned with internal differentiation. The minor differences that constitute this internal differentiation, differentiate a dialogue from within. These strategies are not mutually exclusive but indicate a variation in starting point and orientation. This paper proposes to combine these two strategies by linking accounts of the productive moments in verbal dialogues to an account of the imaginative potential of embodied dialogues. This will enable the articulation of four dialogical principles (derived from Lev Yakubinsky, Oswald Ducrot, Martin Buber, and Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz) through which an imaginative dialogue can proceed.

This paper explores the mystical structure of education as Bildung in medieval theologian and Dominican friar Meister Eckhart’s work and the 2010 French film Of Gods and Men (Des Hommes et Des Dieux). I start this paper with a short introductory sketch of the Bildung tradition, in order to situate my discussion of Eckhart within the more well-known humanist tradition. Here, I claim that Bildung (as we understand it today through the classic Bildung philosophers) points back to its theological heritage and horizon of meaning, when it is claimed as the general tekhnê (art, craft) of making oneself at home in the world with and through others. In my first step, I then explore the intellectual heritage of this mystical structure of Bildung. Drawing on a range of Meister Eckhart’s writings (esp. his German sermons), I elaborate three features pivotal to his concept of Bildung (as image-ing) of the imago Dei (image of God) in the human soul/action: (1) divine grace, (2) human cultivation and (3) the harmonisation of both in (what I shall call) ‘careful gestures'. In my concluding second step, I illustrate this mystical structure of Eckhartian Bildung—with a particular focus on the emergence of careful gestures—through the motion picture Des Hommes et Des Dieux.