EDUCATIONAL THEORY最新文献

The rise of political polarization and disagreement within the United States and other democracies indicates an erosion of the social contract, a deterioration exacerbated by the balkanization of social media, that can negatively impact our social relationships. Recent anti–Critical Race Theory (CRT) narratives in education provide insights into how policy narratives can be used to sow distrust in an educational context. In this paper Jane Lo and candace moore argue for the ways policy narratives can sow distrust as opposed to mistrust. Mistrust points to an ongoing process of determining trustworthiness, while distrust connotes a more decisive and deliberate lack of trust in a person or institution. Lo and moore argue that educational research should pay more attention to the building of trust or mistrust in schools in the current context, where the anti-CRT policy narrative, through amplifying and manipulating existing anxieties and fears in order to motivate political action, capitalizes on and seeks to reinforce the natural mistrust of schooling.

In this essay, Michalinos Zembylas revisits the tension between decolonization and other social justice projects in education scholarship, focusing in particular on the arguments for and against the notion of decolonization as land return. While different colonized communities are justifiably projecting their own political priorities in struggles against specific colonial forms of domination, Zembylas argues that education as scholarship and practice would be well served to recover the anticolonial as a shared intellectual and political project for understanding the different practices and experiences of resistance to colonialism and imperialism around the world. Anticolonial thought and praxis offer education scholars, activists, and practitioners an intellectual and political framework of connectivity and anticolonial solidarity that neither erases differences between decolonization and other political projects, nor fails to foreground community building between fields, approaches, and geographical regions. Instead of seeing different political projects as competing against one another — e.g., by considering social justice projects that do not prioritize land return as misguided or misplaced — anticolonialism seeks to theorize and act against a broad range of colonial practices and by-products that include racism, militarism, resources exploitation, land dispossession, and so on.

In this paper, Caitlin Murphy Brust and Hannah Widmaier begin with the assumption that highly selective institutions of higher education in the United States have a duty to promote civic equality. They employ Wendy Salkin's theory of informal political representation to examine how highly selective institutions should go about promoting civic equality. According to Salkin's theory, someone serves as an informal political representative (IPR) when they speak or act on behalf of others, without having been selected to do so via a systematized selection procedure. Brust and Widmaier argue that as part of their civic educational missions, highly selective institutions should educate their students for informal political representation, and this includes equipping students to (1) serve as effective IPRs, (2) be responsible audience members to others' informal political representation, and (3) deliberate carefully and with open-mindedness about when they should or should not take on the role of IPR. Brust and Widmaier examine two types of injustice that students from marginalized communities face at highly selective institutions, and they explore how education for informal political representation might ameliorate those injustices. The authors conclude by offering some practical suggestions to institutional policymakers and educators.

In this article, Ingrid Andersson discusses the decolonial philosophy of Sylvia Wynter, with a special focus on addressing her concepts of the hybrid human and origin stories. Andersson shows how Wynter's philosophizing about the being of being human is premised on an entanglement of nature and culture that is on par with the posthuman understanding of the ontological inseparability of matter and discourse. She goes on to interrogate some productive tensions between Wynter's decolonial philosophy and posthumanism by pointing out how Wynter's hybrid human formulates an understanding of human nature that is different in itself and not solely in relation to other nonhuman entities. In the final part of the article, she proposes how we, with Wynter, can devise a pedagogical approach that seeks to counteract harmful taxonomizing practices.

In this paper, Katja Castillo approaches the phenomenon of teaching through an analysis of Emmanuel Levinas's unedited conference notes titled “Les nourritures,” “Les enseignements,” and “L'écrit et l'oral.” Levinas's thinking prior to the publication of his major works provides an entry point to his philosophy. In this light Castillo interprets his conference notes as laying the groundwork for the argument he develops later in Totality and Infinity. Drawing on the notes, she describes the phenomenon of teaching as a place to bracket subjective freedom in order to let the other call it into question. The phenomenon of teaching serves as a way to describe the relationship between the same and the other. It is, according to Levinas, a unique interplay between interiority and exteriority, where subjective freedom is intertwined with responsibility to the other, with having to answer to the other. He describes the structure of teaching as characterized by six parts: by being given a past, by reflection, by penetration of freedom, by critical spirit, by transcendence of teaching, and as true symbolism. Following the discussion of Levinas's early writings, Castillo returns to his first major work, Totality and Infinity published in 1961, with the intention of examining the evolution of his phenomenological attitude over time. This approach reveals that Levinas's engagement in formulating a philosophy of education was more robust than previous research has indicated.

The recent shift in social science research toward philosophies of the more-than-human has pushed many scholars to question their understanding of units of analysis and agency. While many engage with agencies of the material, few have attempted to address what might be called the agency of ideas. Here, Alexander Pratt argues that engaging with the agency of ideas is particularly important when dealing with issues like racism, which is the focus of this article. He believes that one reason for the lack of such engagement is the seemingly undefined nature of what we might think of as ideas. In this article, Pratt offers a conception of agential ideas developed through his reading of the metaphysics of Charles S. Peirce and those who have utilized Peirce's theories. This conception will provide an entry point for posthuman researchers to incorporate the protean nature of ideas into their own research methodologies.

In this paper Michael Vazquez and Dustin Webster consider the practice of deliberating about ethical case studies as a means to contribute to the professional development of educators. An ongoing debate is whether or not the study of ethical theory should be included in this practice. Vazquez and Webster argue that a popular strategy, known as the Phronetic Approach, is vulnerable to what they call “epistemic blinders” that arise in the absence of the scaffolding provided by theory. They then sketch an alternative approach to case-based reasoning inspired by Barbara Herman's notion of middle theory. The middle theory approach naturally suggests a balanced method for using case studies in teacher professional development: expose educators to some theory, but only to the degree and at the level appropriate for the specific audience and in light of how frequent interactions with that audience will be.

Philosophical work on self-respect has distinguished between various kinds of self-respect. In this paper, Shiying Li begins by introducing important kinds of self-respect and exploring the conceptual and empirical relations among them. She then discusses the value and political significance of social bases of self-respect for both individuals and society. While political theory on this topic, especially from the Rawlsian tradition, has focused on the social bases of self-respect in a well-ordered society, Li takes on the task of uncovering the social bases of self-respect in an unjust society marked by structural injustices such as racism, sexism, social stigmas, and economic and other social inequalities. She provides arguments, including public reason arguments, for the political priority and urgency of securing robust self-respect for all in an unjust society, and thus paves the way for a discussion of the role that education, especially schooling, can and should play in securing robust self-respect. Li concludes by offering reasons to direct special attention to specific aspects of schooling and by making suggestions regarding a curriculum and pedagogy aimed at securing robust self-respect for all.

Researchers have studied Catholic schools for decades, often in an attempt to extrapolate from them lessons that may help public schools accomplish similar levels of academic achievement and other desirable goals, such as social mobility, social efficiency, and democratic equality. But research that attempts to understand Catholic education from a secular perspective inevitably misunderstands the purpose of education that Catholic schools themselves claim to pursue, i.e., beatitude. This unique purpose is the source of Catholic school identity. Here, Christopher Hurst argues that by considering Catholic education as the practice of a distinctly Catholic tradition, researchers can authentically assess how well Catholic schools are achieving their own stated goals, and whether their practices can be applied outside of a particular Catholic context.

Beginning with the question of the usefulness of Rousseau's Émile for contemporary education, this article explores the fantasy held by educational thinkers and practitioners regarding Rousseau's concept of Natural Education. Using French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan's theory of fantasy, which is based on a relationship between the subject and the object of their desire, Nicholas Stock breaks down Natural Education in a number of ways. Initially, he explores the signifier of nature as an object of desire for both Rousseau and the contemporary educationalist. Next, he examines how Rousseau deploys the signifier in Émile and how this creates an ontology of the child that claims to understand their nature while designating them as Other. This point opens up discussion of desires in light of Lacan's examination of Marquis de Sade and sadism. Equally, in exploring Rousseau's dialectical relationship with Sade, Stock goes on to discuss how the fantasy of nature in Rousseau opens up possibilities of sadistic desire. Finally, he concludes the article by deconstructing the binary upheld between nature and culture through an exploration of pastoral literature. It is this pastoralism that gives a desirable quality to nature, thus sustaining its fantasy in educational circles.